Paul Robeson (38 page)

Paul got such intense warmth and affection from everybody.… She didn't get the same enthusiastic love and affection. And it's the only time I ever, ever saw her break down and cry.… I think Sergei [Eisenstein] and I were the only two people who
actually saw her.… She defended herself by saying it was the cold.
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Back in Moscow that evening, the Robesons went to spend an hour with William Patterson, whom they had known from the early twenties, when he had been married to Essie's closest friend, Minnie Sumner. In the interval Pat had become a committed Communist, and was deeply involved in political work, most recently with the International Labor Defense organization that was spearheading protest against the imprisonment of the Scottsboro boys (the nine black youths accused in the South of raping two white women). Worn down by his efforts, and suffering from tuberculosis, Pat had come to Moscow for treatment and lay seriously ill. The Robesons found him in bed in a dingy, sparsely furnished room—but talking “as enthusiastically as ever.” Essie and Pat had never liked each other, and four days later Robeson went back to see him alone. Pat later told Marie that on the second visit he encouraged Paul to return home and participate actively in the black struggle, but that Paul, though fully agreeing with the importance of the struggle, simply could not see himself living in the States.
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On New Year's Eve, the great filmmaker Pudovkin collected the Robesons for a private showing of
End of St. Petersburg
and
Storm over Asia
. That was followed by a midnight celebration with Eisenstein at Dom Kino, the House of the Cinema Workers, where the revelries got boisterous and the dancing frenzied—Essie, uneasy at the “brutal kicking and knocking about,” decided that the Russians “are a rough people.” That impression was confirmed the following day. Stopping off briefly during their New Year's Day rounds at John Goode's garage, Paul sang and got a raucous welcome—but Essie was a little put off by the “vicious shoving” and the “sickening smell of cabbage” everywhere. Still, Essie was on the whole impressed with what she saw in the Soviet Union—with the improved status of women, the quality of care in the hospitals, the diet and preventive injections given the children in nurseries, and the psychology of childrearing Alexander Luria expounded on during the private tour he gave her (and the visiting left-wing American Muriel Draper) of his Twin Nursery Kindergarten (Luria also told them there was “no room” for psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union—“everyone was too busy”).
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Paul was more impressed still, above all with what he found out about “the minority question.” Far into one night, he and Eisenstein discussed the so-called primitives of Central Asia—the Yakuts, Nentses, Kirghiz, Tadzhiks. Eisenstein said he disliked the unfair implications of inferiority which the term “primitive” conveyed—which was why, he explained, the Soviets had preferred to use the phrase “national minorities.” On another day, Eisenstein came by with Alexander Luria, who told Robeson that one
of his best students was a Yakut, a man who performed “magic rites” alone in his room, yet had “no difficulty whatever” with scientific and conceptual ideas. On a visit to the Technical and Theater School of the National Minorities, the Robesons were intrigued at the mix of faces and colors, at the excellence of the work produced, and at the declared purpose of the training—to send graduates back to their own peoples to form theater groups. Nearly thirty years later, Robeson himself referred, in a speech, to coming in contact during his 1934 trip with “a people called the Samoyeds.… They had come from the northern country, from the so-called Eskimo peoples. ‘Samoyed' in Russian means ‘self-eater.' ‘Self-eater,' that was their own name in 1917, which certainly presumed that they were a backward people.… In 1934 I found out, in the Soviet Union, that there was no such thing on earth as a backward people.”
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He also found strong sympathy for his own “national minority.” At dinner with the theater director Alexander Tairov, Robeson was impressed at how widely the talk ranged over African art, music, and culture. And when he went to see a Children's Theater production, the play turned out to be about how life in an African village was disrupted by greedy white hunters. At intermission, a little boy rushed up to Robeson, hugged him around the knees, and begged him to stay in the Soviet Union—“You will be happy here with us.” Not surprisingly, Essie wrote the Van Vechtens that “We both love it here, and are profoundly interested in what they are doing.”
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The Robesons talked with some of the “minorities” themselves. They spent a lively evening with Jack and Si-lan Chen, whose father, Eugene Chen, had been the first Foreign Minister of the Chinese Republic under Sun Yat-sen, and whose combined ancestry of Trinidad black, Chinese, and English struck Robeson as an ideal blend of cultures. The beautiful Si-lan, a dancer married to Eisenstein's American student Jay Leyda, did not at first take to Robeson: he went “rambling off on an endless comparison of Chinese and African sculpture,” seemed unsure of “the genuineness of his Soviet welcome,” and “determined to be cautious with all new acquaintances.” Si-lan was herself fierce in her devotion to the Revolution. Her art, she said, was designed to be “nationalist [Chinese] in form, and socialist in content”—a precise expression of Paul's emerging wish to combine the integrity of ethnic cultural forms with a humane cosmopolitan vision, and after their first encounter, Si-lan found him “much more relaxed and normal.”
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Robeson also talked at length with American blacks resident in the Soviet Union. VOKS threw a banquet for the Robesons to which most of the black community in Moscow came; Robert Robinson (an Afro-American toolmaker who had come to the U.S.S.R. in 1930 in search of a job—but not out of any ideological sympathy) remembers the reception
as excelling “by far” any such occasion he had attended—formal attire, “exquisite” food, elaborate entertainment. On another evening, the black community itself fêted the Robesons. Essie thought the expatriate Afro-Americans had chosen to marry “very third rate” Russian women; Robert Robinson, in turn, thought Essie more than a little vain and arrogant. According to Essie's diary, all the black Americans expressed deep contentment with life in the Soviet Union, a society, they told the Robesons, that was entirely free of racial prejudice. Robeson became convinced that the Soviets had solved the minorities question—“in the only way it can be solved, by granting self-determination to all nations within its boundaries.”
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Robeson realized “how much my shy, sensitive Pauli would enjoy” the “sincere friendliness” of the Soviet citizenry toward people of color, and he and Essie began to consider the idea of resettling Pauli for a few years in Russia. He had occasionally stayed with his parents in the Buckingham Street flat in London, but essentially he had continued to live with and be raised by Ma Goode. Currently the two were living in New York, where Pauli, just past his seventh birthday, had finally found some children of his own age to play with. Essie was content with that arrangement for the time being, but she didn't want Pauli to “get like those other niggers in New York,” and she warned Ma Goode not to take him “to any nigger beach” and “to keep him up to scratch”—“The more careless his surroundings are, the more sloppy the children, the more important it is to keep his manners perfect, and charming.…” For his part, Paul had paid scant attention to his son's upbringing (“I have no fatherly instincts about him at all,” Essie quoted Paul as saying; “I'm busy with my work and he has people to look after him”), interfering only when he felt Essie and Ma Goode were too incessantly drumming “manners” into the boy—“The poor little fellow has enough to learn, anyway, without being taught a lot of unimportant stuff.” But Paul did want his son “to go to America at regular intervals, so he will know his own people.… I want him to have
roots
. I want him to know Negroes.… I don't want him to be prejudiced. I want him to know and feel that he is a Negro.” Yet for now, having had the idea of placing Pauli in a Soviet school for a few years, Paul actively investigated the possibility. He decided that, if a spring concert tour in the U.S.S.R. worked out, they (in Essie's words) would “go thoroughly into the question of living conditions here” and, if those passed muster, would bring Pauli and Ma Goode over for two years. They felt Pauli would adjust easily, since he was already fluent in German, a language widely spoken in the Soviet Union.
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During his two weeks in Russia, Robeson saw more of Sergei Eisenstein than anyone else. The two men were together on nearly a daily basis. Eisenstein arranged introductions, accompanied the Robesons on visits,
took them on a tour of the film institute (GIK) where he taught, and introduced Paul to a packed audience of artists at a special party for him at the Dom Kino. Essie reported home that Eisenstein was “marvelous company”—“He is young, and great fun, with brains and a sense of humor.” Eisenstein also screened his own films,
General Line
and
Potemkin
, for them—Robeson later told a reporter that he thought
General Line
“easily the finest film I've seen”—and many a time the two men talked far into the night about the possibility of working together on a picture. Eisenstein had been trying for a long while to make a film about the Haitian revolution, and he had tentatively entitled it “Black Majesty” (earlier he had offered it to Paramount but was swiftly turned down). At the moment, Shumyatsky was considering the proposal, and if it went through, Eisenstein hoped to cast Robeson as Christophe (or possibly Dessalines) and the Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels as Toussaint. Eisenstein hoped to use Robeson in several other projects as well—over the next two or three years, they would consider doing a film together based on a Pearl Buck novel, a stage production of the American working-class play
Stevedore
, and, after civil war broke out in Spain, a film on that conflict. All these projects would have to wait for official approval from the Soviet authorities.
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Toward the end of his stay, Robeson sat down beside Eisenstein and talked quietly about the gratitude he felt for the warmth of his welcome. He had hesitated to come, he said, had not really been convinced that the Soviet Union would be any different for him from any other place. But he was leaving filled with enthusiasm for what he had seen and heard—and deeply moved at his personal reception, at “the warm interest, the … expression of sincere comradeship toward me, as a black man, as a member of one of the most oppressed of human groups.” In the Soviet Union he had felt “like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being. Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be.… Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity.”
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Still, Robeson was not yet ready entirely to commit himself to a socialist—or, indeed, any other—political vision. Soon after he returned to London, he told a reporter that his interest in the Soviet Union “was, and is, completely non-political,” perhaps deliberately exaggerating his lack of interest in public so that in private he might be better able to mull over options. Three years later, after he
had
become fully engaged politically, Essie wrote William Patterson that “Paul, in his quiet easy way, has apparently been fundamentally interested for a long time, but has been taking it easy,” delaying overt public commitment until his instincts and his understanding could become consonant. Robeson's deeply disturbing exposure to fascism in Berlin had been immediately followed by his strongly affirmative exposure to communism in the Soviet Union. (Stalin's forced
collectivization programs were already well advanced, and famine was already raging in the Ukraine—but of all this Robeson saw and heard nothing.) Emotionally linked in his experience, they would thereafter be centrally connected in his psyche. Nazi fascism and Soviet communism became opposite, symbolic representations of evil and good, shorthand explanations ever after for opposing forces in the universe. The Soviets, understandably, helped along the courtship; Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in London, henceforth regularly invited the Robesons to Embassy events, including lunch with George Bernard Shaw.
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“Paul is extraordinarily happy these days,” Essie wrote her mother in February 1935, a month after their return, “and it seems permanent.” Fania Marinoff lunched with them at the fashionable Ivy and reported to Carlo that “they both looked marvelous and Essie seems very happy,” though “Paul was full of himself as usual.” Part of his new agenda was to earn enough money in the next eighteen months to free himself from financial worry, allowing more time for political activity. The plan was straightforward: a two-month concert tour of the English provinces, then tryout openings in small theaters for two new plays with politically promising themes:
Basalik
, about an African chief who resists white encroachment, and
Stevedore
, a play of racial and trade-union conflict that had already successfully debuted in New York. If the two plays went well, Robeson planned to tour them in repertory theaters for six months in the provinces. Having “made a fortune,” he would then take a year off and go to Africa and back to the U.S.S.R. Not everyone, however, was prepared to believe in Robeson's conversion to a more politically conscious role. When Nancy Cunard heard that he had agreed to appear in
Stevedore
, she wrote Arthur Schomburg, “The news that Robeson wants to act in it is encouraging. But there, between you and I, my dear Arthur, with R. it is more uncertain. It is a strange ‘case,' in fact. He has given his talent for the German victims of Hitler; he has never, as far as I know, done a thing for his race, anyway in England. So, we shall see.”
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