Paul Robeson (130 page)

60.
Sergei M. Eisenstein,
Immoral Memories: An Autobiography
, trans. Herbert Marshall (Houghton-Mifflin, 1983); Seton,
Robeson
, pp. 78–80; Marie Seton,
Sergei M. Eisenstein
(The Bodley Head, 1952; rev. Dennis Dobson, 1978), pp. 316–34; Jay Leyda,
Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film
(Princeton University Press, 1960, 1973, 1983), p. 299; interviews with Marie Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982; interview with Jay Leyda and Si-lan Chen, May 26, 1985; interview with Ivor Montagu (PR, Jr., participating), Sept. 7, 1982.

CHAPTER
10
BERLIN, MOSCOW, FILMS
(1934-I937)

1.
ER Diary, Dec. 21, 1934, RA; Seton,
Robeson
, pp. 81–82.

2.
ER Diary, Dec. 21, 1934, RA; Seton,
Robeson
, pp. 83–84;
Berliner Zeitung
,
June 21, 1960, an interview with Robeson—apparently a condensation of a longer interview he gave Klaus Ullrich for
Neues Deutschland
—in which he reminisced about his visit to Berlin in 1934. I have followed Robeson's own version of events on the platform rather than the one in Seton—which has struck me as suspiciously elaborate and pat.

3.
ER Diary, Dec. 22, 23, 24, 1934, RA. ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 5, 1935, RA. For more on the Afinogenovs and on Wayland Rudd and other black Americans living in the U.S.S.R., see Langston Hughes,
I Wonder As I Wander
(Hill and Wang, 1956), chs. 3–5. ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 6, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten. Returning to Harlem after three years in the Soviet Union, John Goode gave an interview to the Pittsburgh
Courier
(April 3, 1937) in which he said “social discrimination as practiced in America is unknown in Russia.” According to the Afro-American toolmaker Robert Robinson, who lived in the U.S.S.R. from 1930 to 1964, John Goode later became disillusioned but his brother Frank remained in the Soviet Union (interview with Robinson, May 18, 1988). In Homer Smith's
Black Man in Red Russia
(Johnson Publishing Co., 1964), pp. 196–201, there is a poignant description of Frank Goode's difficult life in the U.S.S.R. during World War II. Following the war, he lived on a wrestler's pension in Gorky, his lot somewhat improved. According to Robert Robinson (interview, May 18, 1988), Frank Goode enlisted his sister Essie's help in trying to get an apartment in Moscow, but her efforts to that end failed.

4.
ER Diary, Dec. 23, 1934, RA; Moscow
Daily News
, Dec. 24, 1934; Chatwood Hall article on Robeson's arrival in U.S.S.R., Chicago
Defender
, Jan. 12, 1935 (comment on Soviet theater);
The Observer
, April 28, 1935 (Uzbekistan). According to Hall, Robeson told the reporters that “The whole future of the Race is tied up with conditions in [Russia, Soviet Asia, Africa, and Soviet China] … especially the Chinese situation, which is much like the situation in Africa.”

5.
ER Diary, Dec. 24, 25, 31, 1934, RA; ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 20, 1935, RA.

6.
ER Diary, Dec. 24, 1934 (she further described Litvinov as “nice, pleasant, homely” and Ivy, “who pays no attention to clothes, or her personal appearance,” as “a curious woman—downright, gruff”); ER to “Mama,” Jan. 20, 1935, RA; interviews with Marie Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982. For more on PR and Ivy Litvinov, see note 12, p. 659. Essie was very fond of Coates (“as fat and as jolly, and soft as ever; full of fun”), and the Robesons saw him fairly often in Moscow, attending one of his concerts at the Conservatory, pleased at the enthusiasm it produced (ER Diary, Dec. 24, 29, 30, 1934).

7.
ER Diary, Dec. 24, 28, 1934, RA; Seton,
Robeson
, pp. 91–92; interviews with Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982. In his autobiography (
The Man Who Cried Genocide
) Patterson makes no reference to this episode. PR several times in later years credited Patterson with helping along his political education (e.g.,
Freedom
, Aug. 1951). In a letter to her mother (Jan. 20, 1935, RA), ER refers to three visits to Pat, though her diary accounts for only two. “Pat was very pleased and flattered that we came so often to see him,” she wrote Ma Goode. She thought he “seemed better, but I think he has botched up some business of the Government, and is not in too high favor at the moment.” Shortly before PR had left for Moscow, he had sentacheckforfifteen pounds to the Negro Welfare Association to be used for the defense of the Scottsboro boys (Reginald Bridgman to PR, Nov. 24, 1934, RA). According to Robert Robinson, Essie “intensely disliked” Patterson. So did Robinson, who in our interview of May 18, 1988, made some serious allegations about Patterson's role in the fall from official favor of Lovett Fort Whiteman, another Afro-American resident of the U.S.S.R. For more on Whiteman, see Robinson,
Black on Red
(Acropolis, 1988), p. 361, and Homer Smith,
Black Man in Red Russia
, pp. 77–83.

8.
ER Diary, Dec. 24, 25 (women), 26 (hospitals), 29, 30 (Luria), 31, Jan. 1 (nurseries), 2 (Luria), 1935, RA; Seton,
Robeson
, pp. 87–88; interviews with Seton, Aug.-Sept. 1982; ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 6, 1936, Yale: Van Vechten. On her return, Essie sent Luria a packet of books (Luria to ER, March 20, 1935, RA). Essie several more times in her diary referred to the “roughness” of the Russian temperament and then, toward the end of her stay, isolated another side of the Russians she “didn't like”—“the maudlin sentimentality, and introspection … the ineffectuality, and tiresomeness” (ER Diary, Jan. 6, 1935, RA).

9.
ER Diary, Dec. 25 (primitives), 1934, RA. Toward the end of their stay, the Robesons spent a few days in Leningrad (ER Diary, Jan. 8, 1935, RA), which is where he came into contact with the Samoyeds (tape of PR's speech in Perth, courtesy of Lloyd Davies, is the source for PR's comments on the Samoyeds).

Whereas much is disputed among specialists about the actual extent of Moscow's sympathy for ethnic diversity (in the thirties and since), there seems general agreement that the Soviets marked an advance over the czars in regard to respecting national minorities and providing for “ethnic enclaves” and for the preservation of minority languages and literature in the schools (though
not
for separate political organizations). This was especially true during the years immediately following the Bolshevik revolution—and even in 1986 the official Soviet publishing agency printed textbooks in fifty-two languages to serve its disparate minorities, and the state radio broadcasted in sixty-seven languages (
The New York Times
, Dec. 28, 1986).

10.
ER Diary, Dec. 27 (Tairov), 28 (Children's Theater), 1934, Jan. 2, 1935, RA; ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 5, 1935, RA; PR, Notes, 1938, RA (little boy); ER to CVV and FM, Jan. 6, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten. The Robesons went to see Tairov's production of
All God's Chillun
.

11.
Interview with Si-lan Chen Leyda and Jay Leyda, May 26, 1985; Silan Chen Leyda,
Footnote to History
(Dance Horizons: 1984), ed. by Sally Banes, pp. 196–97. According to Louis Fisher, the Moscow public which had earlier gone “wild” over Chen's Spanish fan dance, “frowned” on her effort to “dance Marxism”—“For an interpretation of the theory of surplus value one does not go to Terpsichore” (
Men and Politics
, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941, p. 156).

12.
Robinson,
Black on Red
, p. 311; interview with Robinson, May 18, 1988; ER Diary, Dec. 27, 1934, Jan. 3, 1935, RA; Seton,
Robeson
, p. 88; William Lundell interview with PR, 1933, transcript in RA; Ben Davis, Jr., interview with Robeson,
Sunday Worker
, May 10, 1936. The black actress Frances Williams, who was in Moscow at the time of Robeson's visit in 1934, also recalls how impressed he was with the conditions he found there (Williams interview with Kim Fellner and Janet MacLachlan, June 8, 1982, transcript courtesy of Fellner). Frances Williams was later administrative secretary of the American Youth Congress (Williams to PR, July 15, 1941, RA). Homer Smith, an Afro-American resident of the U.S.S.R. until 1946, reports that at least until the first purge trials, efforts at racial equality were abundantly evident in the Soviet Union (
Black Man in Red Russia
, especially ch. 8). Robert Robinson, however, in his bitterly anti-Soviet book,
Black on Red
, disputes the “myth” of Soviet racial egalitarianism even for the period of the thirties (see especially ch. 25).

13.
PR, Notes, 1938, RA (Pauli); ER Diary, Jan. 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 1935, RA; ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 6, 1935, RA; ER,
PR, Negro
, pp. 138, 140 (manners).

14.
ER Diary, Dec. 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 1934, RA; ER to the Boilings, Jan. 5, 1935, RA; ER to Ma Goode, Jan. 20, 1935, RA.
Picturegoer Weekly
, Oct. 26, 1935, for PR's comment on
General Line
; interview with Si-lan Chen Leyda and Jay Leyda, May 26, 1985; Vladimir Nizhny,
Lessons with Eisenstein
, trans and ed. Ivor Montagu and Jay Leyda (Hill & Wang, 1963), pp. 27, 170–71). According to Leyda, Eisenstein thought Robeson was physically too large for the Toussaint role. Leyda thinks
Black Majesty
“was probably doomed even before it became a subject for discussion,” because of the hostility of Film Commissar Shumyatsky—a great pity, in Leyda's view, since the two men would have “worked together wonderfully” (interview, May 26, 1985). For other projects:
Evening
Standard
, Sept. 19, 1936; Chicago
Defender
, Jan. 12, 1935; Amdur to ER, Dec. 30, 1935, RA. In 1937 discussion centered on a film about the war in Spain. In July (?), Eisenstein's wife, Pera Attasheva, wrote Ivor Montagu: “What do you think about Robeson playing the part of a Morocco soldier in Spain—that is the new idea, instead of ‘Black Majesty' (sweet dreams! while Shumyatsky sleeps!)” (as printed in Jay Leyda and Zina Voynow,
Eisenstein at Work
[Pantheon Books/The Museum of Modern Art, 1982], p. 95). Although there is no mention of Mikhoels in Essie's diary, which is detailed for the trip to Moscow, Robeson later said he met Mikhoels during his first visit to Moscow, in 1934. “First in the film
CIRQUE,
his entrance with little ‘Jimmy' was electrifying and very moving” (PR to Dolinsky and Chertok, Feb. 28, 1958, RA).

15.
Seton,
Robeson
, pp. 94–95 (“human dignity”). In the
Daily Rundschau
(Berlin), June 17, 1949, PR refers to his 1934 visit as the first time he felt “the sympathy of a whole people for me, a Negro.” The notion that Robeson may have been bisexual, and had an affair with Eisenstein, has gained some currency (see, e.g.,
WIN
magazine, Sept. 1, 1981). I have found absolutely no evidence to support these suggestions, and my sources have included an interview with a gay man, Bernard Koten, who lived in Moscow in the thirties and knew Robeson there. Eisenstein's sister-in-law, Zina Voynow (interview Feb. 1987), also scoffed at the idea of Robeson having an affair with Eisenstein—though she did not deny Eisenstein's homosexuality. (Si-lan Chen and Jay Leyda, as well as Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, have also confirmed that Eisenstein was homosexual—contrary to Marie Seton's wholly unpersuasive argument that he was not in her
Serge M. Eisenstein
.) Also utterly without corroboration is the rumor that Guy Burgess once “revealed” that PR had had affairs with men. My futile efforts to trace it led me to this passage from a BBC TV show (aired in New York City, April 14, 1983, script courtesy of PBS): “‘Now listen Guy,' he said, ‘when you get to Washington, remember three things: don't be too aggressively left wing, don't get involved in race relations, and make sure there aren't any public homosexual incidents.' ‘I see,' [Burgess] said, ‘what you mean is I mustn't make a pass at Paul Robeson.'”

16.
Record
(Glasgow), Feb. 1, 1935; ER to Patterson, March 22, 1938, MSRC: Patterson. In an unpublished interview enclosed in a letter from J. Steinberg to ER, Jan. 23, 1936 (RA), PR is said to have deplored violence against blacks and to have commented that “Even Soviet-Russia which is now connected with America economically and politically will not protest either against these murders”; the quote seems garbled, yet does convey another instance of Robeson's continuing to express doubt in 1935 about Soviet intentions.
The New York Times
published a curious article (Jan. 2, 1935) reporting that “high officials” in Soviet radio had been dismissed for broadcasting a Robeson recording of “Steal Away to Jesus.”

Maisky to PR, Jan. 6, 1936, RA. For a lively picture of Ivan Maisky and his “gay, confident” wife, Agnes, see Victor Gollancz,
Reminiscences of Affection
(Gollancz, 1968), pp. 132–33. As for Stalin's forced collectivization programs, the Soviet expert Edward Allsworth has put it to me this way: “In 1934 almost
anyone
would have missed what Robeson did.”

17.
ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 8, 1935, RA; FM to CVV, June 3, 1935, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.; ER to CVV and FM, Feb. 17. 23, 1935, Yale: Van Vechten; Cunard to Schomburg, Aug. 4, 1930, NYPL/Schm.

18.
ER to Ma Goode, Feb. 21, 1935, RA.

19.
Soviet Russia Today
, Nov. 1935. The concert manager in Belfast reported that in “thirty years experience he never remembered such a pressing demand for seats at any celebrity or other concert” (Belfast
Telegraph
, Feb. 16, 1935). As for audience response, there are newspaper reports of enthusiastic calls for encores, favorites being shouted up from the crowd, cheering applause, and half the audience staying to clap twenty minutes after the last encore (e.g., Manchester
Daily Dispatch
, March 4, 1935; Aberdeen
Press and Journal
, March 26, 1935). A different,
politically noteworthy kind of reception was the party thrown for the Robesons by some twenty-five black university students in Dublin (
Irish Press
, Feb. 21, 1935), during which Robeson talked about the problems of race. To whites as well, Robeson reiterated his intertwined new themes of racial and musical integrity. He told reporters that his recent studies had further convinced him that the “basic melody” of all national folk music was the same, that “peasants and labourers of all races and nationalities think alike up to a point, and this brings about a basic similarity of their music, which is their form of self expression. If the Hebridean fisher folk and the African fisher folk are doing precisely the same work, under conditions which are very similar, they express themselves similarly” (
Northern Whig
, Feb. 8, 1935; Edinburgh
Evening Dispatch
, March 16, 1935). His contention was that “differences between civilisations disappear in folk-music,” and that folk music, “being melodic, is also particularly congenial to his race, to which melody has always meant more than harmony” (Manchester
Guardian
, Feb. 31, 1935).