25. The film was produced by John Krimsky and Gifford Cochran and directed by Dudley Murphy (best known for his work on the Bessie Smith vehicle St. Louis Blues). The contract, with Krimsky and Cochran, dated Feb. 24, 1933, is in RA, Screenland, Oct. 1933. Fritz Pollard, the black football star and an old friend of Robeson’s, had a tiny part in the film, assisted Krimsky in casting, and served as Robeson’s dresser. Jones also had J. Rosamond Johnson as musical director and anable supporting cast that included Dudley Digges, Fredi Washington, Frank Wilson, and Ruby Elzy. DuBose Heyward was hired to write an opening segment for the film designed to provide background events leading up to the point where O’Neill’s play began, prompting the New Statesman critic later to write, “The people who made this film would adapt King Lear to show you the birth of each of his three daughters, or Hamlet to show his father and mother courting” (The New Statesman, clipping date illegible, 1933), ER to CVV, postmarked June 24, 1933, Yale: Van Vechten. According to Krimsky, considerable pressure was put on him and his partner, Gifford Cochran (like Krimsky, twenty-five years old), to cast Lawrence Tibbett in the leading role, but Eugene O’Neill made it clear that he would give them the film rights only if Robeson was cast in the part (Krimsky, “The Emperor Jones,” pp. 94–95). In high spirits over accompanying Paul to the States, Essie wrote Harold Jackman (April 19, 1933, Yale: Van Vechten), “I’ve got some gorgeous new clothes—yes, more of them—which my lord and master has just bought for me—and I’m a hussey in them.” After spending an afternoon alone with Van Vechten during her stay, Essie wrote him: “I always feel I like to ‘report’ our progress to you, as you are a sort of Godfather to us both. Especially when the report is good news, as it is these days” (ER to CVV, postmarked June 24, 1933, Yale: Van Vechten).
26. “Interview: William Lundell and Paul Robeson,” Screenland, Oct. 1933. O’Neill had “dug down into my racial life,” Robeson added, “and has found the essence of my race. Every word he wrote for ‘The Emperor Jones’ is true to the Negro racial experience.”
27. New York Amsterdam News, Sept. 27, 1933; Philadelphia Tribune, Nov. 2, 1933; Muse to Barnett, Nov. 22, 1933, CHS: Barnett. Two contemporary film critics who have written with special sympathy for the “breakthrough” aspects of The Emperor Jones, despite all its limitations as stereotype, are Thomas Cripps, “Paul Robeson and Black Identity in American Movies,” The Massachusetts Review, Summer 1970, and Richard Dyer, “Paul Robeson: Crossing Over,” ms. courtesy of Dyer (subsequently published as Heavenly Bodies [St. Martin’s, 1987]). New York Evening Post, Sept. 20, 1933; Daily Express, March 18, 1934 (too civilized). Samples of favorable reviews for Robeson are: Daily News, The New York Times, New York Journal-American, New York Sun—all Sept. 20, 1933; The Film Weekly, March 16, 1934; Cinema, Jan. 31, 1934. Among the many damning reviews of the film are: The Observer, May 18, 1934; The Times (London), Feb. 19, 1934; The Tatler, March 28, 1934; New Britain, March 28, 1934. The film, according to Peter Noble (The Negro in Films [Arno reprint, 1970], p. 57), was a financial failure, in part because of distribution problems encountered in the Southern states.
Most of the criticisms expressed in the white press had to do with cinematic, not racial values and are aptly summed up in a letter from Frank Merlin, managing director of the Little Theatre in New York, to Essie: “It definitely has helped Paul in introducing him to a new audience, but it’s a damn shame that Paul was not helped by those around him. He is good in spite of his director, and this, of course, should not be so. The photography is not good. The trick camera work is obvious, and old-fashioned.…” Essie was at that time suggesting scripts to Merlin—including bringing over John Gielgud in Richard of Bordeaux—who was expanding his theatrical organization with the hiring of Eleanor Fitzgerald (Fitzi) of the Provincetown Players, as his general manager. Essie also passed along Countee Cullen’s Leavin’ Time, which (so she wrote Cullen, Sept. 23, 1934, RA), “was definitely good theatre, and had an authentic folk quality.… It was such a relief to read a play about Negroes which didn’t call upon the (by now) very tired audience to get up and sympathize with the poor downtrodden black.…” She added that she’d told Merlin “I’d like very much to read the part of Delia, and if I was any good, to play her.” Essie told Merlin exactly what she had written Cullen, adding (in regard to both Leavin’ Time and Wallace Thurmond’s Jeremiah, the Magnificent), “I was so surprised and glad to read Negro plays by Negroes, which were not about lynching and all the wrongs of the poor black man, that perhaps I am over generous. But I really think “Leavin’ Time’ is good” (ER to Merlin, Sept. 17 [1934], RA).
Bess Rockmore, recently divorced from Bob and remarried to Motty Eitingon was also involved with Merlin and the Little Theatre. The Eitingons were generous people (at one point they gave Essie the present of a silver-fox fur) who were devoted to Paul (and Bess always remained friendly to Essie). Bess Eitingon’s opinions about both the Robesons, cited throughout, have struck me as unusually insightful (interview with Bess Eitingon [PR, Jr., participating], March 30, 1982). The half-dozen letters between Essie, Bess, and Merlin in RA not only detail Essie’s intense activity for a time as a kind of play-reader and scout for Merlin, but also reveal her often shrewd assessments of theatrical properties and players.
28. Star, Aug. 3, 1933 (“doubtful”); New York World-Telegram, June 13, 1933 (“subtleties”); The Film Weekly, Sept. 1, 1933 (Hollywood).
29. The Film Weekly, Sept. 1, 1933 (Negro culture; “trifle exaggerated”); Daily Express, Aug. 4, 1933 (“a great race”; “modern white American”); interview in Tit-Bits, May 27, 1933 (“essentially an artist”).
30. PR, “The Culture of the Negro,” The Spectator, June 15, 1934. A letter in RA from Mrs. Manet Harrison Fowler, president and founder of Mwalimu, School for the Development of African Music and Creative Art, to ER, April 7, 1934, is in response to her inquiry about “the possibility of Mr. Robeson’s continuing his work in an African language of the West Coast of Africa here in New York.” PR’s registration card in the School of Oriental Studies (University of London) shows him enrolled in two courses only during 1933–34: Phonetics in the first term and Swahili in the second.
31. ER to CVV and FM, April 5, 1934, Yale: Van Vechten (“our people”); Zora Neale Hurston to ER, April 18, 1934, RA (I’ve corrected the typos in Hurston’s hastily typed letter [e.g., “steaedily” to “steadily”]; Du Bois to ER, March 27, 1934; ER to Du Bois, April 22, 1934 (U. Mass.: Du Bois). Ultimately, Essie studied more than two years at LSE with, among others, Malinowski, Firth, and W. J. Perry (ER to E. Franklin Frazier, Oct. 10, 1943, MSRC: Frazier Papers. For Padmore, see note 34, p. 634.
32. His 1927 comments on Hayes and Cullen are in Wisconsin Literary Magazine, Nov. 1927. He himself refers to “discovering” Africa while in London in Freedom, June 1953. For a 1920s reference to the “artistic stature” of ancient Africa, see p. 72.
33. Walter White, “The Strange Case of Paul Robeson,” Ebony, Feb. 1951.
34. Robeson’s notes for 1934 in RA are in four sections, totaling eight to ten thousand words. One of the four sections, about one-fifth of the whole, consists of technical philological notes—the position of the tongue in making particular sounds, the use of phonemes, assorted language groupings, etc. The other four-fifths is in the form of jottings, a mix of half-thoughts and fully developed sentences. For the sake of simplicity I’ll use the abbreviated citation “PR, Notes, 1934, RA,” in the rest of this section to designate all four batches of material.
35. For more on the group around the Menorah Journal, see Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 1987), especially ch. 2.
36. It is necessary to differentiate here between what one can call Nationalism (with a capital “N”)—i.e., political separatism—and cultural nationalism (with a small “n”)—i.e., an identification with the folkways, institutions, special historical experience and perspective,
etc., of one’s group. PR, Jr., told me (interview, March 3, 1984) that his father had “no use at all” for the Garvey movement or for the Nation of Islam. “You will never find a single instance of his seeking out, relating to, talking about, having a good word to say about any Nationalist movement in the United States. He saw them as reactionary to varying degrees.… Paul Robeson was not a Nationalist (with a capital “N”) … and made it plain he wasn’t.” Yet, even as regards cultural nationalism, Robeson should not be overly categorized; even at the height of his cultural nationalism in the 1930s, his sympathies were more broadly gauged. Freda Diamond recounts a telling episode: hearing from Freda that Paul, Jr., had described him on a television program in the early seventies as first and foremost a black nationalist, Paul, Sr., said to her, “Has he cut me down to that size?” She told the anecdote during the question period of a panel on PR [with both PR, Jr., and me participating] at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists on Sept. 5, 1987.) The chief proponent of the theory of PR as black nationalist is Sterling Stuckey (Slave Culture [Oxford, 1987], pp. 303–58).
37. PR, Notes, 1934, RA; Levy, Johnson, pp. 65–70 (Johnson’s support of eventual assimilation).
38. PR, Notes, 1934, RA; PR, “The Culture of the Negro,” The Spectator, June 15, 1934 (“Confucius”); Stuckey, Slave Culture, p. 334 (de-emphasizing tribal differences).
There is a letter in RA from Essie to Dr. Ronald Moody, who had apparently solicited assistance for his brother Harold’s League of Coloured Peoples, then surveying Africans living in London with a view toward ameliorating their condition (see note 59). In responding, Essie claimed she and Paul had talked the matter over and “He has definitely said No, and I agree with him.… We are really not interested at all in any Negroes who have decided to stay in this country, whether accidentally or no. We feel they are of no importance whatever, in comparison to the major problem, which is the Negroes, 150,000,000 of them, in Africa. The Negroes here are separated from their natural background.… We feel they really don’t belong here at all, and shouldn’t be here.… Many of them are not even interested in themselves, but in white people’s ideals and ideas, and many of them are trying hard to fit into a white world and a white future. That is their affair, not ours” (March 3, 1934, RA).
But this may have been one of the times Essie wrongly believed (or deliberately set out to create the false impression) that she and Paul were of one mind on an issue. On Seton’s ms. of Robeson (lent to me by Seton), Robeson, in reference to another event in 1934, scrawled: “I was at a meeting called by League of which Ronald Moody’s brother was President. Many Africans & West Indian students were discussing Africa.…” So apparently Robeson did lend his name and presence to a league of whose purposes Essie (at least in 1934) disapproved. Robeson possibly shifted between both views, sometimes identifying with “displaced” Westernized Africans, sometimes scorning their “debasement.” As another example, Seton quotes him in 1934 as saying to her, “… if necessary, I will die for Africa, but what should Africans care about American Negroes when most of them are Americans in culture? Can one expect a Chinese in China to be as concerned about the Chinese in San Francisco as about his own neighbors?” (Seton, Robeson, p. 87.)
39. PR, Notes, 1934, RA.
40. PR, Notes, 1934, RA. It may be a comment on the low state of American Indian studies at the time, and the general contempt with which Native Americans were held, that Robeson did not use that culture to draw analogies with the black one, although wisdom for the Indian also consists in not trying to reduce behavior to “logic,” regarding the spiritual dimension as the pre-eminent one. Five years later he had made the connection, referring to the “many analogies with American Indian cultures” (PR, Notes, 1939, RA).
41. PR interview with The Observer, July 29, 1934. Arnold Toynbee, for one, congratulated Robeson on his “intuition of the malady which a Late Modern Western Society had inflicted on itself,” for “putting his finger on the difference between an integrated and a disintegrated culture,” and for perceiving “that the structural and the spiritual disintegration of culture are two aspects of a single process” (Study of History [Oxford University Press, 1954], vol. 8, p. 501).
42. PR, Notes, 1934, RA; Pearson’s Weekly, Oct. 20, 1934.
43. Star, Dec. 13; Evening Times (Glasgow), Jan. 26; Oxford Mail, March 9; Journal of Living and Learning, March—all 1934. Along with interviews, Robeson published several articles in 1934–36 on these same themes. The most important were collaborations with Leonora (Pat) Gregory (now Stitt), a young Australian-born journalist he met in 1934. In a series of letters to me (1985–86), Pat Gregory has outlined in detail her relationship with Robeson and has generously sent me as well the draft outline of a book she at one point was preparing to write with him, as well as the ms. for her own unpublished book, New Ways. The three articles she co-authored with Robeson were “Negroes—Don’t Ape the Whites,” Daily Herald, Jan. 5, 1935; “Want Negro Culture, Says Paul Robeson,” News-Chronicle, May 30, 1935; “Primitives,” The New Statesman and Nation, Aug. 6, 1936. Gregory has asked me to state, if I mentioned these articles, that “the ideas and nearly all the words were wholly Paul’s” and that she merely “organised” the material. In one of her letters (Oct. 18, 1985), Gregory emphasized Robeson’s need to find someone—as he did in her—to whom he could speak freely without fear that his confidences would be broken; he was so widely known and admired in London that he had trouble finding any protective anonymity. Among the confidences he related to Gregory was that of his broken love affair with Yolande Jackson, though without ever naming her (see note 15). When Gregory found herself in financial difficulty in 1937, Robeson insisted on making her an allowance so she could get on with her writing; he continued to help her financially until he returned to the States in 1939. She saw him again in 1949–50 and visited him backstage at the Stratford Othello in 1959 (“The other friends wondered why he took me by the hand and kissed me. I never told them”: Gregory to me, Feb. 21, 1985).
44. Daily Herald, Jan. 3, 1935 (Nigeria); Star, Dec. 13, 1934 (“lonely”); Daily Mail, Dec. 11, 1934 (“companions”). In a letter in RA from Tohekedi Khama to Dr. Roseberry T. Bokwe (June 21, 1934), in response to an inquiry about the Robesons’ possible trip to South Africa, he promises them “a hearty welcome to the Bechuanaland Protectorate. If you know them and they are your friends, I do not require any further particulars.”
45. Daily Mail, Dec. 11, 1934 (“some day”); The Spectator, June 15, 1934 (“vocal genius”); Huddersfield Examiner, Dec. 4, 1934 (“Wagner”); Film Pictorial Feb. 27, 1934 (“Wagner”).
46. Sheffield Daily Telegraph, March 14, 1930 (“High Water”); Yorkshire Herald, Feb. 14, 1930 (“spiritual significance”); Evening News (London), Feb. 13, 1930; Huddersfield Examiner, Dec. 4, 1934; Sheffield Telegraph, Feb. 21, 1935; Newcastle Journal, Feb. 25, 1935; Sheffield Independent, Feb. 21, 1935; Dundee Courier and Advertiser, March 27, 1935; Lewis, Harlem in Vogue, p. 173 (Harlem elite); Melody Maker, July 19, 1958 (“most important”); PR, Notes 1950s, RA (“Savoy”). In his Music Notes (n.d., 1960s?, RA), PR wrote, “The jazz scale is a new and significant development in the history of music in general and American music in particular … [there is] a unique immediacy, a direct communication here and now—from the living to the living—which jazz seems to provide.” In her diary entry for July 19, 1932, Essie wrote, “Went to Louis Armstrong’s opening, at the Palladium, this afternoon, and was terribly disappointed. I thought he was awful. I saw him in his dressing room afterwards, and thought he was worse. He may be alright on records, but he’s a mess on the stage and in person.” On the other hand, PR wrote in his Notes, 1934 (RA), “Ellington-Calloway have appeared and showed how shallow was all that went before, almost too late—for having received the synthetic, public hardly knows real—when it sees or hears it.” And when Cab Calloway came to London, Essie wrote the Van Vechtens that she and Paul “lived at the Palladium, listening to his Hi-de-hi-de-ho, and p
retending we were in Harlem. He was handled very badly here, which is a shame” (ER to CVV and FM, April 5, 1934, Yale: Van Vechten).
47. Sheffield Telegraph, Feb. 21, 1935 (“decadent”); Star, May 20, 1936 (“genuine”); Daily Collegian (Pennsylvania State University), Dec. 10, 1940 (“St. Louis Blues”); interview with John Hammond, Aug. 8, 1985 (joined by Basie’s biographer, Albert Murray, who corroborated Hammond’s version). The “Kingjoe” record had verses by Richard Wright. Robeson, Wright, and Basie gathered at Okeh for the recording session, along with a group of reporters, photographers, and friends (including Max Yergan and Walter White). Clearly the record was widely regarded as a major event. In evaluating the special qualities of PR’s musical gifts, my interviews with John Hammond (Aug. 8, 1985), Pete Seeger (July 4, 1986), and Earl Robinson (Aug. 17, 1985) were especially helpful. Additionally, I found the insights in Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness and Richard Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society particularly useful.
48. Perth Advertiser, Jan. 20, 1934 (Hebridean, etc.); Gambs to ER, April 18, 1934, RA (Russian); Glasgow News, March 18, 1934 (folk songs); Glasgow Exhibitor, Jan. 3, 1934 (Jews); Jewish Transcript, Nov. 22, 1935. Marie Seton describes Robeson as late as 1933 as innocent and uninformed on the Jewish question and at first reluctant (“I’m an artist, I don’t understand politics”) to play a special matinee of All God’s Chillun to benefit Jewish refugees. Seton claims he agreed after she helped clarify the parallels between the persecution of the Jews in Germany and the blacks in the United States, and further claims that “In later years he referred to this matinee as the beginning of his political awareness.” That event may have been contributory, but in my reading does not bear the heavy weight Seton puts on it (Seton, Robeson, pp. 66–69).
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