Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  27. Browne, Too Late to Lament, p. 323; Time and Tide, June 7, 1930; Morning Post, June 18, 1930 (salary); ER to CVV and FM, May 29, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. Othello drew large audiences on its brief tour, due in part to reduced prices (Sunday Express, Oct. 13, 1930). ER Diary, May 13, June 3, 1930 (Harris), RA; The New York Times, June 8, 1930 (Harris); The Film Weekly (England), June 7, 1930 (film). A telegram from Walter White to PR in RA, March 25, 1930, apparently at the behest of Harris, conveyed the offer, adding, “Miss Carrington, who coached Barrymore, to coach in Diction.” Noel Sullivan, the wealthy San Franciscan liberal who was a sometime patron to Langston Hughes and who Robeson and Larry Brown had stayed with during their 1931 cross-country stop-over in San Francisco, was apparently also involved in efforts to bring Robeson’s Othello to the U.S. (PR telegrams to Sullivan, Feb. 14, March 13, April 14, 1931, Noel Sullivan Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley [henceforth BLUC]).

  28. The New York Times, May 22, 1930; Times Enterprise (Thomasville, Ga.), May 27, 1930; Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; interview with PR in the Leeds Mercury, Nov. 21, 1930: “In New York one is quite safe, but touring the country one visits spots where shooting is a common practice.”

  29. ER Diary, June 10, July 7, 1930, RA; ER to CVV and FM, July 8, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. Apparently there was also talk of filming Othello, but Robeson turned Browne down on that score. “He feels,” Essie wrote Browne, “as I do, that a film will be made forever, and all its faults will mock us in the future, and so he must be careful.… He says his performance must be much better than it is now for a permanent record, and I think perhaps he is right” (ER to Browne, June 28, 1930, UM: Brown/Van Volkenburg). For a more positive view of Browne, see Maurice Evans, All This … and Evans Too! (University of South Carolina Press, 1987); in reference to the 1930 Othello, Evans merely comments, “the less said about that the better” (p. 43).

  30. PR to Ellen Van Volkenburg, n.d. (June/July 1930), UM: Browne/Van Volkenburg; Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982.

  31. ER Diary, June 12, 30, July 2–9, RA; ER to PR, pencil draft (Nov. 1931), RA.

  32. Eslanda Goode Robeson, Paul Robeson, Negro (Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1930 [published in the United States by Harper and Brothers]). The dedication of the book reads “For Our Son.” William Soskin’s review, the New York Evening Post, June 25, 1930 (“bitter”); also W. Keith in The Star, May 20, 1930; and The Observer, March 23, 1930. Rose C. Field in The New York Times (July 13, 1930) wrote that “In the light of literature, this book will not cast lengthy shadows but as a homely picture of a colorful individual it has much to recommend it.” Langston Hughes in the New York Herald Tribune (June 29, 1930) spent most of his review recounting recollections of Robeson and then ended simply by saying, “Mrs. Robeson has written a chatty, informing and naïvely intimate book that couldn’t have been bettered by the best press agent.”

  33. ER, PR, Negro, pp. 132–34. The omitted phrase is in “Changes in Manuscript” sent by ER to her publishers. The woman friend was identified in the English version as “Martha Sampson,” and in the American version as “Marion Griffith”—but was in fact Martha Gruening, sister of Ernest Gruening (later Senator from Alaska). The name changes came about because Gruening, having originally agreed to be quoted, subsequently decided the section put her in an indelicate light, denied the authenticity of the account, and threatened legal action if necessary. To avoid that, Essie substituted the pseudonyms. The dispute is summarized in ER to Saxton, May 8, 1930, RA.

  34. ER Diary, Sept. 1, 1930 (discovery of letter), “October, 1930” (“bitch”), RA; Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984. According to Marie Seton (in a letter to me, Nov. 23, 1982), when Essie discovered that Paul had given Ashcroft a piece of jewelry, “she went straight out and bought herself (charging it to P) a far more expensive jewelry item.” On three different occasions Essie had expressed her admiration for Ashcroft to the Van Vechtens (ER to CVV and FM, March 25, April 22, May 29, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten). Within six months of discovering the letter, and having had a chance to recover her equilibrium, Essie sent Ashcroft a good-luck telegram for a theatrical opening, and Ashcroft responded with a thank-you note expressing the hope that “I may come & see you one day” (Ashcroft to ER, March 7, 1931, RA). When she subsequently met Essie a few times during the mid-thirties, Essie was gracious to her—and Ashcroft was shocked to hear from me of the bitter things Essie had recorded about her at the time in her diary. When Ashcroft later saw PR in the 1950s and 1960s, their meetings were cordial and warm (see pp. 478–79, 507).

  35. ER Diary, “October, 1930,” RA. When a newspaper reporter asked Robeson what would happen if his vocation came into conflict with his “duty to his family,” Robeson is quoted as replying, “Then my family must suffer.” “That’s rather hard saying,” the reporter replied. “It is,” Robeson said. “But it’s the truth. The artist gives joy to hundreds of thousands, perhaps to millions. He consoles, he inspires. He must consider his responsibilities to this multitude rather than to those few” (Daily Herald, July 11, 1930).

  PR opened his one-man show at the Savoy in late Aug. 1930, with Max Montesole playing the Cockney role in Jones. It was not well received by most of the critics; they complained that the first act of Jones did not successfully stand alone (The Star, Aug. 26, 1930; Everyman, Sept. 4, 1930; Sunday Dispatch, Aug. 31, 1930), that a “modernist” London theater like the Savoy was an inappropriately “sophisticated” setting for the spirituals (The Times, Aug. 26, 1930), and that Robeson did not sing lieder well (Evening Standard, Aug. 26, 1930). During the ten-week tour of the provinces that followed the Savoy opening, Robeson attempted considerable experimentation with the format. He dropped the lieder, added some Stephen Foster songs, tried substituting a one-act play by Stanley Houghton, Fancy Free, and, toward the end of the tour, seems to have turned to a full-scale vaudeville format, including a ventriloquist, “feats of strength by the Three Cressos,” an impressionist, and a dancing sequence by Marinek and Constance. None of these experiments met with much favor, though the reviews of the tour were somewhat better than those at the Savoy (Birmingham Post, Oct. 21; Birmingham Mail, Oct. 21; Sheffield Independent, Oct. 28, 1930; ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 2, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten).

  36. PR to ER, Sept. 29, 1930, RA.

  37. ER Diary, “October, 1930,” RA.

  38. The evidence for Yolande being a sometime actress is from Rupert Hart-Davis to me, June 6, 7, 1987, and in John Payne to Larry Brown, June 3, 1945 (NYPL/Schm: Brown): reporting on a visit from Yolande, Payne wrote, “She looks very well, has been with the ‘Erisa’ Concert party doing Shakespears [sic] plays.…” Ironically, Ashcroft first met Robeson through Yolande’s brother, Richard (a barrister who was later with Scotland Yard and was knighted in 1963)—he and Ashcroft’s husband, Rupert Hart-Davis, were good friends. She only met Yolande once and had no clear impression of her (Ashcroft interview, Sept. 9, 1982; Ashcroft Memoir, Aug. 1984; Ashcroft to me, Nov. 10, 1987). The one time Fania Marinoff met Yolande Jackson, she described her as “very lovely” (FM to CVV, July 18, 1932, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.). Essie’s prior knowledge of the affair with Yolande is evident in a cryptic reference in her diary on the day she found the Ashcroft letter: “Found a letter from Peggy at the flat. Exactly like the one from Yolande last year.… I dare not think of it till I get away from here—my nerves are too far gone” (ER Diary, Sept. 1, 1930, RA). Alberta Hunter’s description is in an interview with Sterner; Rebecca West’s comments are in an interview with me, Sept. 1, 1982. Marie Seton, in our interviews of Aug./Sept. 1982, added a few details. Seton met Yolande once or twice in the early thirties; she found her uncommunicative and politically conservative, Seton’s point of contact with Yolande was Gwen Hammond, a Canadian whose father was proprietor of the Fortnightly Review and who had acted in a play with Yolande. Hammond’s impression “was that Paul was really profoundly in love with Yolande.”

  39. Interviews with Uta H
agen, June 22–23, 1982 (“great love”); ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 19, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten; ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1930, RA; ER to Grace Nail Johnson (Mrs. James Weldon), Dec. 19, 1930, Yale: Johnson. The breakdown must have been immediate; as early as Sept. 8, 1930, Essie wrote to Harold Jackman, “I have been very ill with a nervous breakdown” (Yale: Johnson).

  40. The Robesons had first met Noel Coward in 1926, when they went back stage after seeing his play The Vortex: “The play was trash,” Essie wrote in her diary, “but he emanated a sweetness and personality right over the footlights” (ER Diary, Jan. 30, 1926, RA). ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 19, 1930, Yale: Van Vechten. Judging from the half-dozen letters from Jean Forbes-Robertson to the Robesons, they had a polite, rather distant friendship. Forbes-Robertson later married André Van Gyseghem, who within a few years was to be Robeson’s director.

  41. ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1930, RA.

  42. ER Ms. Auto., RA (“Frederick Douglass”); interview with G. Foster Sanford, Jr., April 12, 1983. Bricktop, in her autobiography, claims that at the urging of C. B. Cochran, the English theatrical producer, she told Paul that he would be “ruined if he’d married that white Englishwoman”; “I don’t know if I influenced him or not,” she writes, but a few years later Essie told her, “Bricky, thanks so much. You saved my life” (Bricktop, pp. 128–29). For more on Bricktop, see note 4, p. 618.

  43. At a showing of the film Hallelujah, Essie decided to let the “very attractive Frenchman” who happened to sit next to her caress her hand and then place it on his thigh until, breathing heavily, he had an orgasm. “I thought I would see just what these nudging men do,” Essie wrote in her diary—“It was remarkable.” ER Diary, Dec. 28, 1930–Jan. 25, 1931, RA; ER to CVV and FM, postcard, Jan. 26, 1931; ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 4, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten (illnesses). The night before Paul left for the States, he and Essie went to see Josephine Baker at the Casino de Paris. “She is as beautiful as ever,” Essie wrote in her diary (Dec. 20, 1930, RA), “beautiful body, but is doing the same things she did five years ago. [For more on Baker and the Robesons, see p. 93 and note 8, p. 754]. The show was cheap dirty and stupid, and we were profoundly bored. We could only sit through half the show.” While Essie was in Paris, Clarence Cameron White, director of the School of Music at Hampton Institute, played her parts of his opera about Haiti, Owanga. Two years later, White wrote to Robeson about the possibility of his playing the role of Dessalines in the opera, offering to rewrite it “to suit your voice” (C. C. White to PR, Oct. 10, 1932, RA). Shortly before, Essie had heard the score of Owanga played and thought it “marvellous, thrilling, and wonderful rhythm” (ER Diary, Sept. 27, 1932, RA).

  44. CVV to ER, Jan. 12, 1931, RA (Carnegie); ER to LB, March 7, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown. Judging from the programs in RA, PR added the following “art songs” (as the press called them) to his repertory: Beethoven’s “Die Ehre Gottes,” Mozart’s “O Isis,” Schumann’s “Two Grenadiers” and “What Care I Now,” Purcell’s “Passing By,” Borodin’s “A Dissonance,” and Gretchaninov’s “The Captive.”

  45. “R. W.” [Roy Wilkins], “Talking It Over,” Kansas City Call, Feb. 13, 1931; Wilkins, Standing Fast, p. 104 (“bumpers”) PR to ER, Jan. 27, 1931, RA. Earlier, Robeson had also complained to Ethel Mannin that interviewers “get it all wrong” when he talked to them (Mannin, Confessions, pp. 158–59). The promoters of the Kansas City concert found themselves short of Robeson’s guaranteed fee of two thousand dollars per concert. Robeson, not wanting to disappoint the audience, finally insisted on singing (Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 21, 1931). Robeson stayed with the Fairfax family in Kansas City, who often played host to visiting black artists (since hotels wouldn’t take them). He took time to listen to a talented young woman, Etta Moten, sing for him in the Fairfax living room and encouraged her to continue with her career (she later toured for years in the role of Bess in Porgy and Bess, and became the wife of Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press). Comparing vocal ranges with Etta Moten, he said to her, “I only have an octave, but it’s the right octave” (phone interview with Etta Moten Barnett, April 18, 1985).

  46. ER Diary, Dec. 15, 1930, RA (birthday). There are several short notes from Coward to ER in RA, none revelatory.

  47. PR to ER, Jan. 27, 1931, RA; CVV to ER, Jan. 12, 1931, RA; ER to CVV and FM, Dec. 19, 1930, Feb. 4, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten.

  48. Harlem Home Journal, April 11, 1931; ER Diary, March 4–April 14, 1931, RA. In her diary Essie refers to possibly having a gynecological procedure performed in New York (for the pertinent entry, see note 15, pp. 578–79). In regard to her friendship with Noel Coward, Essie wrote, “We had begun back in December in London, when I was all upset with Paul. Noel Coward had been marvelous to me, had come often to the flat to talk with me, dine with me, and I had been out with him.… When Paul finished his tour of the provinces and came into town, Noel invited him to the theatre with me and out to supper afterwards. We had a lovely talk, and Paul was impressed” (ER Diary, April 18, 1931, RA). After 1931, Essie’s friendship with Coward cooled, but she did go backstage after seeing Design for Living in New York in 1933 and recorded that she and Coward had “a nice chat” (ER Diary, Feb. 13, 1933). I have found no evidence of a sexual affair. Graham Payn, Coward’s longtime lover and the editor of his diaries, which start in the 1940s, has gone through the earlier material and recalls no reference to Essie Robeson (phone interview with Payn, Sept. 3, 1982). Nonetheless, the oblique reference in PR’s letter (Jan. 27, 1931, RA) leaves the matter in doubt.

  49. ER Diary, April 15, 1931, RA; ER to PR, “pencil draft,” Nov. 1931, RA; ER to CVV and FM, April 20, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten; ER to Grace and James Weldon Johnson, April 18, 1931, Yale: Johnson.

  50. Era (London), May 27, 1931 (rehearsals); ER Diary, May 10, 1931, RA. O’Neill first had the idea of PR’s doing Yank (Light to ER, n.d.; O’Neill to ER, April 10, 1930, RA) and was enthusiastic enough about it to make sure the Gate Theatre in London, which had done an earlier production of the play, did not revive it at a time and in a manner that might conflict with Robeson’s production (O’Neill to Bright, June 12, 1930, UCLA: Bright).

  51. A mixed review for Robeson appeared in New Age, May 21, 1931, and the two negatives were in The Lady (never a fan of Robeson’s), May 21, 1930, and the Sun Dispatch, May 17, 1930: “Cannot Paul Robeson control that lovely voice of his? If he uses it as abandonedly in the future as he did on Monday night, it means that every part he takes will seem like the tragedy of an opera singer, who has missed his vocation, rather than the author’s conception of any other human character.” The Graphic comment on his physique is in May 23, 1931. The many negatives for the play include The Times, May 12, 1930; the Daily Express, May 12, 1930; Stage, May 14, 1930; News-Chronicle, May 12, 1930; Star, May 12, 1930 (“splendidly vital”; “racial consciousness”); also on the racial dimension, Daily Express, May 12, 1931; Morning Post, May 12, 1931; Star, May 12, 1931; Reynolds News, May 17, 1931; Sunday Times, May 17, 1930 (“expressionism”); ER Diary, May 11, 1931, RA.

  52. ER to CVV and FM, May 23, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten.

  53. Ethel A. Gardner to LB, May 21, 27, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown; ER Diary, May 15, July 27, 30 (Gambs), 1931, RA; Daily Herald, May 22, 1931 (no acting); Daily Express, May 11, 1931 (repertory theater); The Observer, May 10, 1931 (Africa, Russia). An editorial in the Evening Standard (May 22, 1931) expressed concern over Robeson’s announced plans to sing Russian music: “Something more than mere voice or even the greatest artistry is required. For to sing a gypsy song one must be able to interpret the longings and desires of a highly complex, if somewhat savage, nation.”

  54. ER to PR, “pencil draft,” Nov. 1931, RA. In her Guggenheim application (RA), Essie described her purposes in going to Africa as a wish to study “the relation between the modern American Negro and the African, and to learn [to] how great an extent our original racial characteristics have been submerged by western culture and transplantation. I hope to find material for a Negro-African play and n
ovel.”

  55. ER to LB, March 7, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown.

  56. ER to CVV and FM, Sept. 6, 1931, Yale: Van Vechten (PR’s concerts); ER to Grace Nail Johnson, Sept. 6, 1931, JWJ Papers, Yale (Africa); ER Diary, June 11 (hemorrhage), June 15 (nursing home), Aug. 19 (ill), 1931, RA; PR to Dr. Lowinger, Aug. 5, 1931, RA. Essie described living arrangements in Kitzbühel, and also Pauli’s governess, in detail in ER to Noel Sullivan, Sept. 29, 1931, BLUC. Essie left for Austria on Aug. 7. Judging from the full schedule she maintained between Aug. 5 and 7, it seems unlikely she had an abortion while still in London. After entering the sanatorium in Austria, she wrote in her diary (Aug. 19, 1931), “They know what its all about!”—implying, though not specifying, an abortion. One suggestion that she and Paul slept together is in her diary, June 17, 1931, which reads, “Paul came to dinner, and we had a very pleasant afternoon. He remained all night, and we had a delightful talk about many things.” She saw Michael Harrison with particular frequency (ER Diary, June 2, 11, 18, 21, July 25, Aug. 5, 1931, RA).

  PR’s occasional concerts during these months did not meet with notable favor, though he did some further experimenting—including readings from the “Uncle Remus” stories, using local trios to perform instrumental music, adding a few Russian songs, and continuing to sing some lieder. In regard to the latter, The Observer’s critic (Oct. 4, 1931) commented: “Sterner control over rhythm is needed in these more formal songs. The improvisatory method of the spiritual is not stable enough to give them complete expression.” On the other hand, Ethel A. Gardner sent Larry Brown encouraging reports of the tour—good houses, with Paul “improving all the time” (EG to LB, July 14, 1931, NYPL/Schm: Brown; also June 18, 30, July 6, 21, 28, Aug. 14, 25, Sept. 8, 15, 21, Oct. 1, 6, 12, 23, 27, 1931). Gardner made some new records with Robeson (including “Daniel”) and accompanied him during six radio broadcasts, arranging some new songs for him.