Paul Robeson (36 page)

Robeson was not content to work out these views in the privacy of his study. In a series of interviews with the press in 1934, he publicly elaborated his new opinions. “I am more interested in cultures than in politics,” he told one reporter when discussing Africa: “Political and economic systems rise and fall, but the soul of a people lives on.” Blacks “are a race,” he told another, “but not a people.… We are as disharmonious as the white race is.” Yet blacks “everywhere still feel a bond of unity,” even if they do not everywhere recognize that Africa is “their own spiritual centre,” but a politically unified—“a national” Africa—was for the time being “so immensely remote that we need not think about it.” (“For a long time to come
Africa will continue to be controlled by Europeans.”) Robeson felt sure that Christianity, at least “as preached by the missionaries and churches,” was the wrong unifying force; it “was not what Africans needed”; it would not heal the enmity between, say, the West African and the Bantu. He did not pretend to know what would, or what kind of leadership was available and desirable. He did know that he personally could not play a leadership role—could not “play Mr. Gandhi for Africa”: “I cannot do it. I have been out of touch with the culture and people myself too long. The root of the matter lies in giving the African Negro a pride in himself.”
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In that cause Robeson felt he did have a contribution to make. “A mighty task confronts us,” he said, “to go to Africa and reveal to the blacks their own historical mission. And this task is much more important than my singing.” He told the press that he hoped to go to Nigeria soon, “to find some pure African music and songs,” to make periodic visits thereafter, to learn the languages, “so that as soon as I arrive I can feel at home,” and, eventually, to live permanently in Africa. A disbelieving reporter asked if by that he had in mind some village in the Congo. “Why not?” Robeson replied. “They are my own people, and I would be on my native soil. Among white men I am always lonely.” “I am tired of the burden of my race,” he told another reporter, a burden that “will be with me so long as I remain here” in the West. “In England I have found perfect freedom and peace, but it has not been so with my friends—companions of my own race. Where I am welcomed they are not.”
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He did not yet feel ready for repatriation—“Some day I shall go. Not yet; I have work to do here.” Part of that work involved trying to restructure his own music. He announced to the press his decision that “classical music” would play “no further part” in his concert programs; he would concentrate in the future on presenting “the folk music of the world.” “This is a permanent departure,” he said. He no longer had any desire “to interpret the vocal genius of half a dozen cultures which are really alien to me.” He had attempted lieder in the past and could speak the German language, but he now concluded that there was “little in the German Romantic school that I feel I can make my own. I cannot sympathize with Wagner, for example. I like him for his general lusciousness of effect, but his music does not stir anything within me.” Bach and Mozart, yes; they stood apart for him; the
Art of the Fugue
he found “intoxicating.” But henceforth his chief concern would be “trying to find an Art that is purely Negro, that is not dependent on Western and European influences.”
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In this regard, he rejected jazz as well as Wagner. Jazz “reflects Broadway, not the Negro. It exploits a Negro technique, but it isn't Negro. [It] has something of the Negro sense of rhythm, but only some.… The rhythmic complications of [African dialects] … make Duke Ellington's hot rhythms seem childish.” He elaborated further the following year: “Jazz,
which is admittedly negroid in its rhythmical origin, is no longer the honest and sincere folk-song in character.… Jazz songs like ‘St. Louis Blues' or ‘St. James's Infirmary'… are actually nearer to their folk-song origin than they are to Tin Pan Alley, but … most of it isn't genuine negro music any longer”—and as for a jazz piece like “High Water,” it was merely “a vulgarized form of ‘Roll, Jordan, Roll.'” (“I would rather get together half a dozen African drummers and listen to them. Their rhythm is so much more complicated.”) In dismissing jazz as having “no spiritual significance,” and in saying it would have no “serious effect on real music,” Robeson was expressing an opinion shared by most “serious” composers and critics of the day. The early explorations of the jazz idiom on the part of Copland, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Weill, Křenek, and others, these critics argued, had just about exhausted its possibilities. Robeson was also echoing an attitude that had existed in the twenties among the black bourgeoisie and some of the Harlem elite—though for very different reasons. Whereas the black upper crust denigrated jazz as the music of their Southern peasant antecedents (an attitude they applied as well to the spirituals), Robeson came to disdain it because it was not a
pure enough
expression of those folk origins. However, just as the Harlem elite had eventually succumbed to the mania for jazz in the late twenties, Paul also seems in later years to have been able to set aside his theoretical arguments with it and to enjoy it for what it was. Throughout the forties, he frequented such legendary jazz joints as the Apollo and Café Society to hear the big bands and some of the jazz greats, like Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. In the fifties he would go “up to the Savoy Ballroom very often to hear Count Basie … downtown to hear Don Shirley and back up to Manhattan Casino to hear Charlie Parker and get ‘twisted around' trying to dance to those ‘off beat riffs', down to the Apollo to hear Dizzy Gillespie take flight.… And Thelonious Monk really floored me.” And much later, in 1958, Robeson would come around to saying, “For my money, modern jazz is one of the most important musical things there is in the world.”
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But if, in the thirties, he scorned jazz as “decadent,” he had a much higher opinion of the blues, considering them “as much genuine darkie material as the negro spirituals,” and was especially admiring of Bessie Smith. The one attempt he himself would ever make at a blues recording, however, had disappointing results. “King Joe,” a musical tribute to Joe Louis, recorded in October 1940 with the Count Basie band, demonstrated clearly that Robeson was far more comfortable with a straight melodic line than with the “impure” phrasing, the flattened notes, and the melisma of jazz or blues. John Hammond, the Columbia recording director who was involved in the session, remembered Count Basie's saying in an aside, “It certainly is an honor to be working with Mr. Robeson, but the man certainly can't sing the blues.” Robeson would have agreed: his self-knowledge
and his modesty about his musical accomplishments were keen. “Boy, if I had known I wouldn't have been thrown off the stage,” he once told a reporter after a concert, “I would have come out singing the ‘St. Louis Blues.'”
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Ultimately, Robeson's inclinations were with folk music. As he said in 1934, folk songs were “the music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression by the people for the people of elemental emotions.” It was to such music that he now turned his attention, especially to the folk songs of the Russian, Hebrew, Slavonic, Highland, and Hebridean people, the idioms that in his view held the deepest affinity with the underlying spirit of Afro-American songs. The close kinship he felt with Hebrew culture now led him to declare publicly—his first such declaration—that the current Nazi oppression was “the most retrograde step the world has seen for centuries.”
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In his periodic concerts in the British Isles during 1934, Robeson did make some innovations in his program offerings—but they met with limited success. In addition to his standard repertoire of spirituals and work songs, he added a group of Russian songs arranged by Gretchaninov, the Welsh “David of the White Rock,” the Scottish “Turn Yet to Me” and “Loch Lomond,” the Mexican “Encantadora Maria,” a Finnish ballad called “The Wanderer,” and the English “Oh, No, John, No.” Enthusiastic audiences filled the concert halls, but some critics, even the provincial ones who in the past had tended to be almost uniformly worshipful, gently suggested that his greatest affinity was with the songs of his own people. The critic on the Birmingham
Post
was less than gentle: Robeson's voice, he wrote, “is really very intractable”; in the past the force of his personality—unaffected, direct, humane—and not his musical technique had been primarily responsible for his success, his “rather primitive methods” being an ideal match for his material, which he had “always wisely determined by an exact knowledge of his limitations”—thus accounting for “the perfect ‘rectitude' of his performance.” In expanding his repertory to include the folk songs of other peoples, he was in danger, these critics warned—perhaps uncomfortable with a Robeson they could no longer pigeonhole—of constricting the worth of his musical contribution.
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Robeson had still less success when he cast around for a film role that might foster the ideals he had come to espouse. He thought his search was over when, early in the summer of 1934, the Korda brothers offered him the role of the African chief Bosambo in a film they were planning based on Edgar Wallace's book
Sanders of the River
. Zoltán Korda had already spent five months in Central Africa, taking 160,000 feet of film on African life, including music, speech, dancing, and rituals, and Robeson thought the footage “magnificent”—vivid confirmation that Africa “had a definite culture a long way beyond the culture of the Stone Age … an integrated
thing, which is still unspoilt by Western influence.” He was thrilled, too, at the recordings Korda brought back of African music; they revealed “much more melody than I've ever heard come out of Africa. And I think the Americans will be amazed to find how many of their modern dance steps are relics of an African heritage—a pure Charleston, for instance, danced in the Heart of the Congo.” Passing up an offer from the Chicago Opera to do two performances of Amonasro in
Aida
(at a thousand dollars a performance and with the certainty of enormous national publicity), he accepted the Kordas' offer to play Bosambo.
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A reporter from
The Observer
who came to interview him about the project found him “alight with enthusiasm.” “Listen,” he said to the newspaperman as he played his records of native African speech on the gramophone—“Listen to this bit of syncopation. No wonder the Negro carries the power to syncopate in his blood. Everything the American Negroes have got they've got directly from Africa—dances and rhythms—movements of the body and ways of walking. Only the original rhythms are a thousand times more complicated.” The movie, he told the reporter, promised to be a milestone, the first comprehensive film record of African culture. He found the prospect enormously exciting—“For the first time since I began acting, I feel that I've found my place in the world, that there's something out of my own culture which I can express and perhaps help to preserve—for I'm not kidding myself that I've really gotten a place in Western culture, although I have been trained in it all my life.”
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Even as the film neared completion, Robeson remained confident of its value. “Every scene and detail of the story is faithfully accurate,” he told a reporter visiting the re-created Congolese village the Kordas had built at Shepperton. Some of the music being used was “genuine African melody,” and most of the 250 extras in the film were blacks recruited from English port towns who had been born in Africa and came from the actual tribes portrayed (Jomo Kenyatta, cast as a minor chieftain, was one of them). “I am sure,” Robeson told the press, that the film “will do a lot towards the better understanding of Negro culture and customs.” Essie reported to the Van Vechtens that it was “great fun” working with the Kordas; “they know their business thoroughly and are human beings.”
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Ultimately, Robeson was bitterly disappointed. It turned out he had lent his talents and invested his hopes in a film that ended up as a glorification of British imperialism. Robeson later told the New York
Amsterdam News
that “the imperialist angle” had been “placed in the plot during the last five days of shooting,” and that he had been powerless to protest the shift in emphasis since he had no contract provision for approval of the finished film. (And he told Freda Diamond that he made an attempt to buy back the picture to prevent its release.). But the picture's pro-colonial bias is in fact embedded in its very fabric, including the basic characterization
of Bosambo as a loyal lackey dependent on his white master. The African scenes, moreover, though authentically shot on location, are cut and placed in such a way as to signify disparagement, creating an aura made up in equal parts of sentimentality and anachronism. Nor is the film's overarching and explicit theme, of the necessity of a white presence to bring order out of the savage chaos of black Africa, confined to the final reel. The advertising for
Sanders
accurately portrayed its message: “A million mad savages fighting for one beautiful woman! … until three white comrades
ALONE
pitched into the fray and quelled the bloody revolt!”
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Robeson may have been misled in part by the Edgar Wallace book from which
Sanders
had been devised. In Wallace's original story, the English District Commissioner is no mere benevolent despot, but a calculating martinet who controls his black subjects through flogging, irons, and hanging. As the Kordas moved gradually away from Wallace's scenario, the changes may have seemed incidental and insignificant—until their accumulated impact was finally felt. It's worth noting, in this regard, that Jomo Kenyatta seems to have felt no qualms about the direction the film was taking, expressing “delight” in “the music and the spirit of the African scenes.” Even after its completion, Kenyatta joined in the presentation of a cigarette case to Korda, adding his name to the inscription inside (“With deep admiration and gratitude”), and no one has ever accused Kenyatta of insufficient dedication to the cause of African independence and the integrity of African culture. Kenyatta never again spoke of the film, and Robeson was to speak of it disparagingly; “It is the only one of my films,” he said in 1938, “that can be shown in Italy and Germany, for it shows the Negro as Fascist States desire him—savage and childish.” In all likelihood, both men were too immersed in their particular segments during the actual filming to get any perspective on the whole—and too emotionally invested in the film's initial promise to see in time that its negative potential was being realized instead.
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