Paul Robeson (134 page)

21.
The Cine Technician
, Sept.-Oct. 1938;
Daily Record
(Chicago), Feb. 28, 1939;
Daily Express
, June 9, 1938, and PR ms., “The English Theater,” n.d. (1938), RA (“inside turned”; “talented tenth”).

22.
Malcolm Page, “The Early Years at Unity,”
Theater Quarterly
, Oct.-Dec. 1971, pp. 60–66; Raphael Samuel,
Theaters of the Left 1880–1935
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 59–64, 94–95. The Program for Unity Theatre (RA) contains its statement of purpose; interview with Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, July 20, 1985. Robeson also lent his name to Unity Theatre's fourteen-person General Council, along with (among others) Sean O'Casey, Harold Laski, Stafford Cripps, Victor Gollancz, Tyrone Guthrie—and Maurice Browne, the producer of the 1930
Othello
; but Robeson did not actually attend the council's meetings (interview with Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant, July 20, 1985). At the inaugural ceremonies for Unity, on Nov. 25, 1937, Gollancz spoke, Robeson sang, and O'Casey sent a message of support.

23.
Page, “Early Years”; interview with Marshall and Brilliant, July 20, 1985. The program for
Plant
(RA) does indeed omit the names of the actors, but a contemporary photograph of the Unity Theater (
Weekly Illustrated
, June 25, 1938) reveals a large placard over the building's entrance prominently advertising PR's name immediately underneath the play's title. Herbert Marshall (interview, July 20, 1985) recalled that Robeson lent him money during the run of
Plant
but begged Marshall not to let Essie know.

24.
Time and Tide
, July 16, 1938; Unity Theater, “Press Statement,” 1938, RA.

25.
Beste's recollections are in a 1979 letter to Ann Soutter (who had also been a member of Unity), as copied and sent to PR, Jr., May 14, 1985, courtesy of PR, Jr. In her covering letter, Soutter recalled Essie as “a real watchdog, and needed to be, for Paul was very soft hearted. She would send a taxi to pick him up after the performance.… If he wasn't home in time she would telephone to know the reason why.” Sterner interview with Alfie Bass.

26.
Haemi Scheien, “Paul Robeson Becomes an Amateur,”
Drama
, July 1938 (“drying up”);
Weekly Review
, June 23, 1938 (“compact”);
Evening Standard
, July 25, 1938 (“gentle strength”); Manchester
Guardian
, June 16, 1938.

27.
The ms. of PR's speech at the Jamaica meeting (Town Hall, July 17, 1938) is in RA; Marie Seton,
Panditji: A Portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru
(Taplinger, 1967), pp. 94–97. Seton, who was working on a biography of Krishna Menon before her death, recalled (in our interviews of Aug.-Sept. 1982) that Menon and Robeson had very much liked each other.

28.
Daily Worker
, June 29, 1938 (Dutt); two-page typed notes of PR's welcoming remarks, RA.

29.
Nehru to ER, July 7, 21 (“delight”), Oct. 13, 1938, Jan. 27, 1939; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to ER, Sept. 15, 1938, RA; ER to Richard Wright, April 19, May 31, 1939, Yale: Johnson; ER to CVV, July 16, 1938, Yale: Van Vechten (“thrilled to death” with Wright's
Children
). Four versions of the introduction Robeson wrote to
Uncle Tom's Children
are in RA (all contain the sentence quoted).
When Wright's theatrical adaptation of
Native Son
, written in collaboration with Paul Green, opened on Broadway two years later, PR telegraphed him, “You have advanced the cause of your people immeasurably and doubly strengthened your place in American letters. Congratulations and thanks!” (March 24, 1941, Yale: Johnson). Contrary to PR, Van Vechten thought
Native Son
“an overrated book if there ever was one” (CVV to Harold Jackman, Feb. 8, 1941, Bruce Kellner, ed.,
Letters of CVV
, p. 176. When imprisoned in 1941, Nehru asked Essie to send him more books, enclosing a list of thirteen titles, which included Reinhold Niebuhr, Ortega y Gasset, Carl Becker, Admiral Mahan, and Upton Sinclair (Nehru to ER, Aug. 2, 1941, RA). Harold Leventhal, the theatrical agent who served as a GI in India during World War II, recalls meeting Nehru soon after his release from prison; almost his first question was “How is Paul Robeson?” The very next week, according to Leventhal, he met Gandhi—who asked him exactly the same question (phone interview with Leventhal, Oct. 13, 1983).

30.
Nehru's remarks about Essie are in a letter to “Betty,” Oct. 12, 1943, as published in S. Gopal, ed.,
Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
(Orient Longman Ltd., 1980), vol. 13, pp. 255–56. For a time in 1938, Robeson was thinking of visiting India as a stopover on his way to Australia—but the tour was canceled. Seton (interview, Aug. 31, 1982) told me she was convinced not just that Nehru was available for an affair with Essie but that she backed off because of the “cultural divide” between them.

31.
Essie's U.S. trip is most fully reported in the New York
Amsterdam News
, Aug. 6, 1938. While in New York she saw, as always, a lot of theater, including Langston Hughes's
Don't You Want to Be Free?
Hughes had written her to suggest she read the play, even while doubting it was “anything Paul could do abroad,” since he had written it “expressly for a Negro theater” (i.e., Negro audiences) (Hughes to ER, July 16, 1938, RA). Descriptions of PR's tour are from: Eastbourne
Gazette
, Aug. 10, 1938; South Wales
Evening Post
(Swansea), Aug. 13, 1938;
Herald and Express
(Torquay), Aug. 22, 1938;
The Scotsman
, Sept. 2, 1938;
Daily Mail
, Jan. 14, 1939; Aberdeen
Express
, Jan. 18, 1939;
Express and Star
, Jan. 23, 1939. Preparations and arrangements for the tour are recounted in a series of letters from H. M. Horton (of Harold Holt Ltd.) to Larry Brown, May-July 1939, in NYPL/Schm: Brown. At Glasgow, Robeson sang in aid of a food ship's being sent to Spain, and just before he stepped onto the platform, the mother of two little boys, George and Eric Park, brought them to him in an anteroom to show him an autograph book belonging to their father, which Robeson had signed in Spain—just days before their father was killed. Robeson was deeply moved by the encounter and referred to it “in the quietest of voices” when he took the platform (Glasgow
Bulletin
, Aug. 19, 1938). In September 1938, Robeson further demonstrated his commitment to the Loyalist cause by taking supper with thirty Manchester members of the International Brigade and singing at a Merseyside meeting to commemorate the Brigade's fallen members (Manchester
Guardian
, Sept. 19, 29, 1938).
Star
, Nov. 16, 1937;
Daily Mail
, Nov. 24, 1938 (poll).

32.
Mark Naison,
Communists in Harlem During the Depression
(University of Illinois, 1983), pp. 198–99; Barnett to PR, July 19, 1938, Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society (hereafter CHS: Barnett). The American Red Cross in Washington, D.C., felt the need to censor part of an article on Robeson that referred to his pro-Soviet sympathies, to avoid having “many readers in this country condemn him” (Charlotte Kett, author of the article, to ER, June 27, 1939, RA).

33.
Daily Telegraph
, Nov. 1, 1938;
News-Chronicle
, Nov. 2, 1938; PR interview with J. Danvers Williams, “Why Robeson Rebelled,”
Film Weekly
, Oct. 8, 1938. At this time a potential film deal fell through with British National Films Ltd., though the main reason seems to have been financial rather than ideological (John Cornfield to ER, Nov. 14, 1938, RA). Robeson sought legal advice in successfully breaking an earlier contract agreement with Walter Futter, who had produced
Jericho
, to make another picture
with him (Crane to PR, Feb. 14, 1939; the agreement with Futter, dated Feb. 10, 1937, is in RA).

34.
Jewish Chronicle
, Nov. 4, 1938 (cinemas); Cambridge
Daily News
, Dec. 1, 1938;
News-Chronicle
, Dec. 23, 1938;
Daily Herald
, Dec. 24, 1938;
Answers
(London), April 8, 1939 (fees).

35.
Edney to PR and Hannington to PR, both Dec. 29, 1938 (NUWM), RA; Fred Copeman to PR, Jan. 10, 1939 (NMF); Monica Whately to PR, Feb. 17, 1939 (League); J. R. Cox to PR, Feb. 20, 1939 (Coloured), RA;
The Times
(London), May 1, 1939 (SCR). In these same months, Robeson also adopted a hundred Spanish children for a month, was signatory to a letter urging the American government to lift the embargo against Republican Spain, and was invited to become a vice-president of the Society for Cultural Relations … British Common wealth and the U.S.S.R. (SCR) (Judith Todd to PR, Oct. 13, 1938). When S. I. Hiung solicited a statement from him to be sent to the Chinese people, Robeson replied with this message: “Greetings to the Chinese people who are so heroically defending the liberties of
all
progressive humanity” (Hiung to PR, Oct. 16, 25, 1938; PR to Hiung, n.d. [1938], RA).

36.
Western Mail
, Dec. 8, 1938; Arthur Horner,
Incorrigible Rebel
(Macgibbon & Kee, 1960) (Welsh hunger marches in 1927, 1929); Mark A. Exton, “Paul Robeson and South Wales: A Partial Guide to a Man's Beliefs,” M.A. thesis, University of Exeter, Oct. 1984; Sterner interviews with Tommy Adlam and William Paynter.

37.
ER to Harold Jackman, April 12, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten (Australia); Seton,
Robeson
, p. 119 (anti-Nazi); Rockmore to Larry Brown, Feb. 21, 1938, RA. The New York
Post
, June 20, 1939, called the revival of
Jones
“magnificent,” and the New York
World-Telegram
, June 22, 1939, thought Robeson “in brilliant form.” Luretta Bagby Martin, a student at Pennsylvania State University, when Robeson gave a concert there in 1939, asked an employee at the Nittany Lion Inn, a college property, whether the college “honored the non-discrimination rule in the dining room. He reported that Robeson took his meals in his room” (Martin to me, June 1, 1985). Robeson was also in contact with the radical labor organizer, Ella Reeve Bloor (“Mother” Bloor) during his stay in the States (the references are in letters from Mother Bloor to her children, in Bloor Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (henceforth SSC: Bloor).

38.
Sunday Worker
, June 4, 1939; Woollcott to PR, May 28, 1939, RA; Yergan to PR, June 2, 1939, RA; Walter White to PR, two letters June 15, 1939, one marked Special Delivery (“I have been trying to reach you for several days without success”); Parkinson to White, June 14, 1939; White to Parkinson, June 15, 1939, LC: NAACP; ER to PR, May 31, June 2, 1939, RA; ER to CVV and FM, July 19, 1939, Yale: Van Vechten.

39.
CVV to FM, Aug. 2, 4, 1939, Kellner, ed.,
Letters CVV
, pp. 167–68; FM to CVV, Aug. 3, 1939, CVV Papers, NYPL/Ms. Div.

40.
The Worker
, Sept. 1, 1964 (met in Harlem early twenties); PR to Ben Davis, n.d. (1954–55), courtesy of Nina Goodman (Mrs. Ben Davis); Herndon to “My dear Paul” (suggesting prior acquaintance), June 17, 1939, RA; accompanying Herndon's letter is a news clipping from the Birmingham
World
, describing the activities of the Negro Youth Congress. In 1934 Herndon had written his own appeal for justice,
You Cannot Kill the Working Class
, and then, in 1937, a second book,
Let Me Live
, which credited the Communists as being the most effective rallying point against white supremacy. For more on Herndon, see Naison,
Communists in Harlem
.

41.
Dorothy Heyward to PR and ER, May 3, 1939; ER to PR, June 25, 1939 (Vesey), RA; for PR's interest in the Hey ward play during the forties, see note 47, p. 665. Anderson's letter to PR (March 3, 1939) is reprinted in Laurence G. Avery, ed.,
Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson
(University of North Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 84–86, which also refers to ER to Anderson, March 29, 1939, in which she cites PR's refusal to perpetuate a stereotypic image of blacks. In 1941–42 Robeson was marginally involved in abortive negotiations by Clarence Muse
for an all-black production of Brecht and Weill's
Threepenny Opera
. In a letter to Essie, Weill characterized the contract Muse offered him as “the most shameful proposition that has ever been made to me,” and in response Essie expressed relief that Weill had held on to his rights—“We feel the idea of a Negro Theatre is a splendid idea, but I must say the actual workings of it at the moment are not so splendid!!” (ER to Kurt Weill, March 22, July 15, 1942; Weill to ER, June 11, 1942, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music [henceforth KWF].) For the subsequent history of
Eneas Africanus
, and the renewed possibility in 1945 that Robeson might become available to perform in it, see Ronald Sanders,
The Days Grow Short: The Life and Music of Kurt Weill
(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980). In turning down the script, ER wrote Anderson a long and revealing explanation, an attempt to blend diplomacy with self-respect.

You may perhaps know, that the general public has taken it for granted that Mr. Robeson
REPRESENTS
to some extent, the Negro race, the Negro thought, and the Negro behavior. This is extremely inconvenient for us, as it limits our scope a great deal. It is also very unfair and unreasonable and irritating. If he plays a drunk, then Negroes are drunkards; if [he] plays Ol' Uncle Tom, then all Negroes are “handkerchief heads” and don't want to be free. It is ridiculous, of course, but there it is.

We both feel very deeply about our problems as a race; while we are not at all sensitive, we are deeply conscious—which is another matter altogether. Mr. Robeson feels that one of the reasons for the almost universal prejudice against our race is the fact that very few people know anything about us (as a race). The ignorance is largely deliberate, we feel. The general public's idea of a Negro is an Uncle Tom, an Aunt Jemima, Ol' Mammy, and Jack Johnson. These types have always been sold to the public deliberately. Well, now they don't exist any more except in the sentimental minds of credulous people, and we feel that we certainly must not do anything in any way, to prolong their non-existent lives!!! We feel Mr. Robeson must play a Negro who does exist, who has something to do with reality. That's all he asks.…