Paul Robeson (40 page)

When the shooting was over, James Whale wrote Robeson to say, “Your ‘Joe' is really magnificent,” and to express the hope that “I will have the pleasure of directing you in a starring vehicle soon.” The likely vehicle for a time seemed to be the C. L. R. James play,
Black Majesty
(it had the same title as Eisenstein's proposed film). Whale, as well as Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, became excited about the script after Robeson showed it to them, and they immediately bought the film rights. “What we all three want to do,” Whale wrote Robeson, “is to get you going in ‘
BLACK MAJESTY
,'” and Hammerstein thought the film “must be done on a very broad scale or not at all.” The picture would cost less to make in England, and Hammerstein (perhaps momentarily forgetting
Sanders of the River
) felt “such an unusual undertaking will have a better chance with Korda who is a man of taste and courage, untrammeled by the superstitions and the conventional convictions of Hollywood producers.” Besides, Hammerstein wrote Robeson, “Popular as you are here, you are even more popular in England.” But three months later, Hammerstein's interest had waned,
and he wrote Essie that “it would be better to keep
BLACK MAJESTY
in abeyance.” The postponement became permanent.
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While the film languished, Robeson tried out the stage version. Arriving back in London late in January 1936, he went directly into rehearsals for the James play. (For the unknowing, the
Sunday Times
identified Toussaint as “the subject of one of Wordsworth's sonnets.”) Sponsored by the Stage Society, the play was given on several Sunday evenings in March 1936. The critics thought Robeson made the most of his material but didn't think much of the material, denigrating it as a “careful prose record” while elevating his performance above it. “By the rules that apply to others,”
The Times
wrote, his acting “is clumsy, but his appearance and voice entitle him to rules of his own.” The critic on the
Evening Standard
lamented that “Japhet in search of a father was not a more forlorn figure than Mr. Paul Robeson in search of a play.”
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Still, it was an experience Robeson valued, not least for the opportunity it gave him to broaden his friendship with C. L. R. James. The two men had been acquainted before the production, but they got to know each other much better during it and remained in contact over the years. James recalls that Robeson's power onstage was primarily due not to his acting skills
per se
but to the immensity of his personality: “He was a man not only of great gentleness but of great command.… The moment he came onto the stage, the whole damn thing changed. It's not a question of acting.… The physique and the voice, the
spirit
behind him—you could see it when he was on stage.… But he wasn't a John Gielgud. No. And I say that not with any desire to discredit him but to place him historically.”
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James had the impression that Robeson was a man of deep “reserve” and was “detached” from any interest in the glamour or material rewards of a theatrical career—though not, in James's opinion, because it had as yet been superseded by any profound political commitment. James—who was himself a committed Trotskyist—never felt that Robeson became political “in the sense that Richard Wright did”—that is, “a revolutionary political person, whose whole life was spent, wherever possible, in striking blows at capitalist society.” James felt that Robeson came to be “on the side of the revolution; he was on the side of black people; he was on the side of all who were seeking emancipation. But that wasn't his whole life.” Where Richard Wright, in James's opinion, “would have stopped doing anything to strike a serious political blow,” Robeson “was not that type.” He was, rather, “a distinguished person giving himself to revolutionary views”—which was why George Padmore, “a hundred-percent Marxist,” always felt “a certain reserve” toward Robeson, even while he “admired and thought very much of him.”
³⁴

Because Robeson kept his own counsel until he had taken whatever amount of time he needed to digest a given issue, his behavior could be
characterized from the outside according to the viewer's own script. At exactly the time when James was doubting Robeson's temperamental ability to commit himself to Marxism, Emma Goldman—who as an anarchist had as early as 1922 expressed her disillusionment with the Soviet system as a betrayal of the Revolution—was expressing concern that he might have already overcommitted himself. In response to a letter from Essie describing how happy her brothers were in Russia, Emma replied that the Soviets might have done away with “the barbarity of racial differences,” but much else in their system was deplorable. She had heard “the claims of the Communists that Paul has become a full fledged Communist,” but whether the reports were true or not, and she hoped not, “I love and admire Paul's genius so much that [the claims] … could have no effect on me.… Politics and politicians come and go, they rarely leave a ripple on the surface of the human struggle. But creative genius goes on for ever. Besides, I never believe what the Communist press writes about anybody.” Emma's long-standing commitment to anarchism and Paul's growing attachment to socialism did not get in the way of their cherishing their relationship. According to Freda Diamond, Paul told her that Emma once picketed a political event in which he was participating; he walked off the platform, took Emma's sign out of her hand, gave her a hug, handed her back the sign, and then returned to the platform.
³⁵

Robeson, meanwhile, continued to educate himself. Essie reported to the Van Vechtens that Paul had become so excited over Sidney and Beatrice Webb's 1935 book,
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?
(a work full of glowing predictions and devoid of criticism), that he read bits aloud to her, “marked it all up with pencil marginings,” and “turned down pages everywhere.” He also read most of the leading Africanists of the day—Westerman, Oldham, Willoughby, de Groot, Soothill, Levy-Bruhl, and Hornbustel—and he wrote Melville Herskovits, the pioneering anthropological authority on Africa, with whom he had briefly roomed in the early twenties when both were graduate students at Columbia, asking for additional reading suggestions; Herskovits sent a long bibliography and a large envelope full of reprints. Robeson joined Jomo Kenyatta, Z. K. Matthews, and other guests at gatherings at the West African Students Union, receiving “prolonged applause” when he spoke, at one such event, about the need for Africans to “wake up and do something for themselves.” He asked Langston Hughes for some of his “left poems” for possible conversion to songs, and Hughes sent him three about lynching and four about the Revolution (“Breaking the bonds of the darker races, Breaking the chains that have held for years …”). When Mei Lan-fang, the famous male interpreter of female roles for the Peking Opera, arrived in London, Robeson sought him out to discuss Chinese culture. When Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the Fisk University sociologist who had been one of the guiding spirits of the Harlem Renaissance, came to London (he had written ahead
to ask Paul about hotel accommodations, wanting, for the sake of his wife, to avoid “embarrassment”), he and Robeson had a long talk about the prospects of “race war.”
³⁶

Robeson also sought out Norman Leys, a white doctor and a committed socialist who had lived in various parts of East Africa from 1902 to 1918, written the influential book
Kenya
, and spent a lifetime pleading the African cause in Britain. Leys recognized the cultural richness of the African past but felt that colonialism had already destroyed its most vital aspects and that traditional African institutions had not, in any case, reflected an intrinsically different set of human needs and aspirations. He saw African tribalism as a source of weakness, a hereditary form of division that had facilitated European exploitation, and he believed Africa should modernize along Western lines. He and Robeson disagreed on many matters, yet respected each other's opinions. Leys thought Robeson judged “aesthetically rather than morally or rationally”—admitting he was “a Westerner” even while claiming that “all American Negroes have kept much of their inherited African culture.” In his view, Robeson wished to keep alive “a specifically African philosophy and way of life” where it existed and revive it where it did not, even while recognizing that he “is a heretic, for his own people want to be 100% Americans and deny their possession of racial characteristics” that he asserts they still have—and although, further, he recognized that “Negrophobes are delighted with the doctrine of a special racial character” (which didn't in itself disprove its existence). Leys was putting his finger on real ambivalences within Robeson's evolving views. Even in his own notebooks for 1936, Robeson continually veered back and forth, now emphasizing that the Afro-American was “essentially decadent” and would be “happy if tomorrow he could disappear as a group into the American conglomerate mass,” now emphasizing instead that, “emotionally, the modern American Negro would find himself quite at home in Africa,” insisting that “the bond is one not only of race but more important of culture—of attitudes to life, a way of living.”
³⁷

Robeson attempted to resolve his own ambivalence by thinking of the assimilationist black as “deluded” in insisting upon his “European heritage to the exclusion of his African one”—in ignoring the “fact” that “in every black man flows the rhythm of Africa; it has taken different forms in America, in the Caribbean, in South America, but the base of all these expressions is Africa.” The assimilationist was also deluded, Robeson believed, in thinking that the way out of bondage lay in “deliverance by some act of a God who has been curiously deaf for many centuries; for certainly if prayer and song and supplication could effect a release, the Negro in America would long ago have been free.” Robeson offered as his “humble opinion that we can get nowhere until we are proud of being black—and by the same token demand respect of
other people of the world. For no one respects a man who does not respect himself.”
³⁸

When talking to Leys, Robeson spoke repeatedly of his belief in some unique essence that blacks carried with them from their African past. Finding his ideas “vague and confused,” Leys pressed Robeson as to whether he thought this “essence” was inherently racial or traditionally cultural in origin. He could not extract an answer that satisfied him. (Perhaps because Robeson did not wish to give it. In his private jottings at just this time, he wrote: “I base nothing on distinctions of race. They are too vague. But color distinctions cannot be avoided. Neither can cultural differences.”) If African “differentness” was inherently racial, Leys was prepared to agree with Robeson that some tangible basis existed for asserting the future possibility of unifying all Africans under one cultural banner. But Leys found “no evidence extant so far to prove the existence of special racial mentalities.” If, on the other hand, Robeson believed the African was different because of his special tribal heritage, Leys was prepared to argue that the past had no automatic claims on our loyalty: “If there is such a thing as a body of African tradition, I see no reason to think it deserves a higher place in African life than the O.T. [Old Testament] or the Sagas or the Vedas.” He deplored the destruction by foreigners of Kikuyu or Zulu social life, but not when the abandonment of old values resulted from exposure to new ideas: “No-one of us has the right,” Leys argued, “to keep others away from the fruit of that tree” from which they had themselves imbibed, with the usual mixed results of bringing death in one hand and abundant new life in the other—“they have the same right to face the danger as we have.”
³⁹

As against Robeson's wish to preserve and foster the African “essence,” Leys protested that such “deliberate exaltation of a group is bad” in the same way nineteenth-century nationalism was bad: it sanctioned and glorified “exclusiveness.” It did so, moreover, on the assumption that the exposure of Africans to Western ways would inescapably result in a diminishment for Africans. But Western scientific thought—the great bugaboo—was not, in Leys's view, inherently evil, and could only be portrayed as such when science was misconstrued as mere information rather than a process of discovery; the study of scientific “truth itself cannot be other than a wholesome discipline.” Just as Leys claimed his own “right to the full human heritage,” so he claimed it for Africans:

… if an African finds his personal ideal best fulfilled outside African life he ought to be free to leave it.… World citizenship means in practice maximizing both liberty and variety
inside
every human group, whether it be family or any larger one not excluding nation and race. Liberty must obviously diminish or destroy characteristics
peculiar
to the group.

To Robeson such views represented the familiar Western tendency to assign primary value to the needs of the individual rather than the community. He agreed with the ideal of
enabling
Africans “to become world citizens”; but he continued to hope Africans would employ their opportunities
selectively
, choosing—as the Chinese had—to incorporate only those aspects of the “newness” that would better help them sustain their traditional emphasis on the needs and values of the collectivity. Robeson wanted to protect an invaluable heritage, Leys to create a still “better” synthesis.
⁴⁰

Through interviews and co-authored articles, Robeson further clarified and expanded his views. He did not doubt, he wrote, that Western science “worked miracles” and through its accumulated knowledge allowed growing power over “the
external
world.” But that kind of material power had come to be considered the only source of “good,” the “measure of all things.” In his view, the ultimate questions lay not in the realm of knowledge “but of ethics”—which is what Leys had meant in calling his approach “aesthetic” and “unrealistic.” Robeson felt the African heritage, with its concern for the inner life and for community values, had much to recommend it. He could not accept “wealth and luxury as the ultimate goal of human activity”—or the apparent equanimity of a man like H. G. Wells in suggesting (in
The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind
) that spiritual needs, the “mystery” of ultimate truths, were outside the bounds of everyday life. Robeson realized that many of his own people admired him, ironically, precisely to the extent that he had become successful on Western terms and had accumulated Western-prized luxuries. “They think I must be happy and proud,” but “deep down inside me I am African, and for me the African life has a much deeper significance.”
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