Paul Robeson (34 page)

At the end of January 1933, Paul went into rehearsal for a London production of
All God's Chillun
, and Essie sailed for New York. (“I had thought of
economizing, and taking second class,” she wrote Larry Brown, “but decided against it, as I'm getting too old now to change my habits.” She had just turned thirty-six and felt “happier than I have ever been in my life,” convinced that she and Paul “understand each other now.” She also felt secure in her determination to create a separate career for herself. Both her play,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, and her novel,
Black Progress
, had been turned down by producers and publishers, but, never one to let grass grow under her feet, Essie rechanneled her ambition into acting. While in the States, she intended to investigate the possibility of enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and perhaps as well in Professor George Pierce Baker's famed course in playwriting at Yale. “It's a grand prospect,” she wrote in her diary; “I feel as though I shall really be fulfilled, at last. Paul has been sweet through it all, sharing my enthusiasm; advising and helping. I've never seen him so sweet, so understanding, so attractive. I think now I can be happy with him, for the rest of my life.”
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Essie was not merely indulging a private fantasy. On his own terms—which did not include sexual fidelity or Essie's control over his business affairs—Paul did seem willing to reconstitute some semblance of their marriage. The shock of Yolande's desertion had been profound, the more so perhaps for replaying the childhood trauma of his mother's abrupt death. He would never again actually propose marriage to any of the women he became involved with, though to the more significant among them he would sometimes suggest that external circumstances alone—political and career considerations—prevented him from making a formal, public commitment to them, much to his own regret. For now, the stormy three-year courtship of Yolande still fresh, Paul was content to retreat to a facsimile of domesticity and, above all, to recommit himself to his work. “Am terribly happy at No. 19 [Buckingham Street—their flat],” he jotted down in a few notes to himself at the end of December 1932:

Henceforth, all my energies will go into my work.… Unquestionably, Russian songs are right … most right for me.… As for languages—Russian—basic; German-French for
pictures;
Spanish; Dutch (as bridge to German); Hungarian along with Turkish (as
bridge
to
Hebrew
). Send for all records at home, then
Swedish
. I
feel so ambitious. Want to work all day
at something.…

He told a reporter from the Manchester
Guardian
that his immediate plans included acting in a play by the Hungarian playwright Lengyel, filming
The Emperor Jones
, studying Russian literature, finding theatrical vehicles that would allow him to play such famous blacks as Pushkin, Dumas, Hannibal, Menelik, Chaka, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, and starting a repertory company in a little theater to alternate Shakespeare, O'Neill, and contemporary plays.
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First up on his ambitious new agenda was
All God's Chillun
. Robeson referred to the role of Jim Harris, the gentle, sympathetic black law student in
Chillun
, as “still my favorite part,” and the London production proved one of his happiest experiences in the theater. He was blessed with a brilliant young costar, Flora Robson, as Ella and a talented director, André Van Gyseghem, a pro-Soviet activist involved with the working-class Unity Theatre.
Chillun
was staged at another laboratory theater, the Embassy. To the surprise and delight of Van Gyseghem and Ronald Adam, manager of the Embassy, Robeson agreed to a salary of ten pounds for the run. As a further gesture of commitment, he personally wrote a check for one hundred pounds when an unexpected demand from O'Neill's agent for an advance in royalties threatened to sink the Embassy's tiny budget and derail the production.
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In their later recollections of the rehearsal period, Van Gyseghem's and Flora Robson's memories coincide. Both found Robeson entirely approachable, considerate of others, open to direction. “He was not up on a throne but a real human person that you could contact,” Van Gyseghem recalls. Even so, Flora Robson felt at first a little shy of him, afraid that Ella's racist lines would offend him. But after the first week of rehearsals he had put her at ease. She, superbly trained and a brilliant technician, believed that Paul acted from instinct—he either “felt” a role or couldn't perform it—and thereafter she followed Stanislavski's precept that all acting hinges on giving and receiving, and never took her eyes off him while playing. The result was a conflagration of emotion, “something so fantastic,” according to Van Gyseghem, “that at times I felt, in those rehearsals, that I ought not to be there. They were stripping themselves so naked, emotionally.” Though in his view Paul was “not a finished actor,” Paul's technical deficiencies—awkward body movement, a tendency to declaim—themselves fed into the role of the uncertain, desperately sincere Jim Harris, heightening the impact of the performance. The London critics agreed. They gave the edge to Flora Robson, but their praise for Robeson was nearly as unanimous, and the combination of the two was widely hailed as (in the words of
The Observer
's reviewer, Ivor Brown) “a perfect dramatic partnership.”
Chillun
drew enough attention to extend its run for a week at the Piccadilly, but because Robeson had a commitment to film
The Emperor Jones
in the United States, the play had to close after two months.
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Essie accompanied Paul to New York for the filming of
Jones
, but the two did not share the same living quarters; Essie again stayed separately with Hattie and Buddy Boiling. On arriving in May 1933, Paul went immediately into production at Paramount's Astoria Studios on Long Island. For his first talkie and first commercial film, he was given a salary (for six weeks' work) of fifteen thousand dollars plus traveling expenses; moreover, his contract stipulated that he not be asked to shoot footage south
of the Mason-Dixon line. The film's budget of a quarter of a million dollars was described by
Screenland
as “an almost unheard of sum for an ‘independent' production,” but in fact the final cost of $280,000 was low, even for 1933. The producers built an artificial jungle and swamp in Astoria, complete with heaters in the water to prevent Robeson from coming down with one of his frequent colds. The chain-gang sequences were shot in New Rochelle, and Jones Beach substituted for a Caribbean island. For the Harlem saloon scenes, director Dudley Murphy decided to serve the cast real liquor instead of the customary tea, in order to “heighten the realism,” but the scenes were never printed—the cast got drunk and proved “unmanageable.” After the first days of shooting (the entire filming was completed in thirty-eight days), the Will Hays office, the industry's censoring agency, insisted on seeing the rushes. Viewing the passionate footage between Robeson and Fredi Washington, Hays insisted it be reshot, lest the light-skinned Miss Washington come across as a white woman. With Hays warning that the sequences would eventually be cut if the required changes weren't made, the producers reluctantly applied dark makeup to Miss Washington for the daily shoots. The Hays office eventually settled for merely cutting two murder scenes and a shot of a woman smoking.
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Reporters visiting the set, aware that the character of Brutus Jones had not been drawn with an eye to pleasing all segments of the black community, asked Robeson for his own opinion of the play. It's a “masterpiece,” he told one of them; “O'Neill sounds the very depths of Jones' soul.… Coming from the pen of a white man it's an almost incredible achievement, without a false note in the characterization.” The black press did not, on the whole, agree. When the film was released in September—a mere two months after completion—it produced considerable controversy.
²⁶

Some black commentators emphasized their satisfaction at a black man's playing the leading role in a movie that subordinated the importance of whites—that alone, they said, constituted something of a filmic revolution. But others were vocal in complaint. The New York
Amsterdam News
praised Robeson's acting but denounced the use of the word “nigger” in the film as a “disgrace.” The Philadelphia
Tribune
pointed out that images derived from stage and screen helped to form the negative view most whites had of blacks, and called Robeson himself on the carpet for perpetuating the stereotype of the black man as “essentially craven, yielding to discouragement as soon as momentary triumph has passed … becoming a miserable victim to moral breakdown and superstitious fears.” A fellow black actor, Clarence Muse, reported from Hollywood in a private letter to Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press, that “all agree that [Robeson] gave a great performance but story and direction poor.… I think it a damn shame to use such an excellent actor to put over damaging propaganda against the Negro.” The white press made no such
complaint, but its reception, too, was tepid—if on different grounds. Several critics complained that Robeson was too civilized a man to convey successfully the loutish aspects of
Jones
, but generally they greeted his portrayal as a highly auspicious commercial screen debut, even while expressing contempt for his vehicle.
²⁷

Robeson himself stressed, at least in the public interviews he gave, the positive benefits he'd derived from acting in the picture. “I was doubtful whether my art could be expressed through the medium of the film,” he explained to one interviewer, “but my experience of filming in New York has changed my ideas”; to another he expressed surprise at the ability of the camera to pick up the subtleties in a performance. When asked by an English reporter about the prospects of going to Hollywood, Robeson replied, “I'm afraid of Hollywood.… Hollywood can only realize the plantation type of Negro—the Negro of ‘poor Old Joe' and ‘Swanee Ribber.'” He felt increasingly interested in doing “human stories.… A good Negro comedy, if I could find one. Rider Haggard's novels—‘Allen Quartermaine,' for example, which has a fine romantic story and an excellent Negro part in Umslopogas. Stories of the great Negro emperors—Menelik, Chaka. America … would hardly believe that there had ever been such a person as a great Negro emperor, but in England you know it. You have had to conquer one or two.”
²⁸

Robeson was beginning to expand his indictment of American life and, in a parallel development, to stress the special grace of the black subculture lying within it. To the extent that American culture was distinctive (he told a representative from
Film Weekly
on returning to London after the completion of
Jones
), it derived from Negro culture—most obviously in the area of music. “We are a great race, greater in tradition and culture than the American race. Why should we copy something that's inferior?” he told the
Daily Express
. “I am going to produce plays, make films, sing chants and prayers, all with one view in mind—to show my poor people that their culture traces back directly to the great civilisations of Persia, China, and the Jews.” Going much further—publicly—than he ever had before, Robeson described the “modern white American” as “a member of the lowest form of civilisation in the world today.” When the rest of the press picked up the remark and Robeson was asked if the attribution had been accurate, he replied, “A trifle exaggerated.” His new outspokenness, however, continued for a while longer to be a matter of fits and starts. “I am proud of my African descent,” he told an interviewer in 1933, “but I am very far from being color-conscious in the sense in which your true Communist is class-conscious. But then you must remember that I am essentially an artist and a cosmopolitan.…”
²⁹

Newly vocal on themes that had quietly engaged him intellectually for years, his excitement grew, and he began an energetic effort both to
broaden his own insights through formal study and to incorporate his emerging new perspectives into his concert work and his future plans. Robeson had always enjoyed the study of language; now it became a passion. He enrolled in the School of Oriental Studies (part of London University) to do comparative work in African linguistics, with the eventual goal (soon aborted) of taking a Ph.D. in philology. He began “haphazardly” by studying the East Coast languages, and then the Bantu group (his own ancestral background), finding in these tongues “a pure negro foundation, dating from an ancient culture, but intermingled with many Arabic and Hamitic impurities.” From them he passed on to Ewe, Efik, and Hausa, the West Coast African languages, and immediately found “a kinship of rhythm and intonation with the Negro English dialect” that he had heard spoken around him as a child. It was “like a home-coming”; when he began to study, he felt he “had penetrated to the core of African culture.” His hope was “to interpret this original and unpolluted negro folksong to the Western world.…”
³⁰

He supplemented his course work with a close study of phonetics, using gramophone recordings he had collected of the folk songs of many cultures and an intense program of reading. He began to talk not only of visiting Africa but also of settling there eventually. Essie, simultaneously, began work in anthropology at the London School of Economics and University College, specializing in the study of African cultures. “When we get through,” she wrote the Van Vechtens, “we will know something about ‘our people.'” After she and Paul read Zora Neale Hurston's
Jonah's Gourd Vine
, Essie wrote to Hurston to express their admiration and to describe the African studies she and Paul had embarked on. Hurston wrote back that the news was “thrilling”—“I feel so keenly that you have at last set your feet on the right road. You know that we dont know anything about ourselves. You are realizing every day how silly our ‘leaders' sound—talking what they don't know.… Harry T. Burleigh [and] Roland Hayes … talking some of the same rot.… One night, Alain Locke [the black scholar at Howard University], Langston Hughes and Louise Thompson [the black political radical] wrassled with me nearly all night long that folk sources were not important … but I stuck to my guns.… I have steadily maintained that the real us was infinitely superior to the sympathetic minstrel version.… I am truly happy that you and Paul are going to sources.… That is glorious.…” When W. E. B. Du Bois reminded Essie that her husband “owes
THE CRISIS
an oft-promised article,” she replied, “I told Paul what you said about the article and he laughed and said he was too hard at work finding out about these African languages and learning to speak and read them to stop now. All the better, for when he is ready to talk, he will have a great deal of interest to talk about, I'm sure.”
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