Paul Robeson (30 page)

Essie stayed on in Paris for a few days after Paul left for the States, feeling lonely but determined not to brood. She looked up some old friends, got her hair waved, and set out to see the town, touring the shops and the theaters. On New Year's Day 1931, she had word from Pauli's governess in Switzerland that both he and Ma Goode had fallen ill. Essie spent the next month taking them for medical consultations with physicians in Vienna, where Ma Goode was found to be suffering from an acute abscess of the kidney and Pauli from distorted vertebrae near the base of the spine. He was given artificial sun treatments and massage, and Ma Goode was given injections. Both improved rapidly, and Essie next decided to take herself in hand. “Still a little frightened over the paralysis business,” she consulted a Viennese “nerve specialist,” who told her the paralysis had been “due entirely to shock” and gave her “a good reconstructing nerve prescription” and a regimen of ten hours' sleep a night. As she, too, began to improve, she queried the Van Vechtens, in her continuing capacity as Paul's business manager, on how his concert tour in the States was going, whether “he actually sang the German and Russian songs, and how they went. I do so hope he had another great success. Bless him. He's a good scout.”
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The tour, in fact, had not started out well. Carlo and Fania reported to Essie that during the inaugural Carnegie Hall concert the spirituals had gone splendidly but the lieder Paul had added to his program were not well
received. Larry Brown, who was accompanying Paul, confidentially cabled Essie that “nothing was going according to plan.” “What has happened to the tour?” Essie wrote back. “Is he lying down on it? Or is it really the [economic] depression? I feel the fault must be in him. Even in the worst possible depression here in England, he still drew crowds.… Is he fed up, is he bored, is he angry? Has he lost interest in his work? Or is he just lying down as he so often has?”
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As Robeson moved across the country—and the tour carried him all the way to San Francisco—he became additionally agitated because of press misrepresentation. The newspapers reported that he had decided to include European songs only because black audiences had demanded them, that the younger “and more intelligent” blacks tended to dismiss the spirituals “as something beneath their new pride in their race,” and that, although Robeson himself felt black artists “ought not do anything except their own folk-lore,” he had tacked “art songs” on to his repertory to appease the protestors. Robeson complained about this misrepresentation during an interview for the Kansas City
Call
with Roy Wilkins (who was shortly to move to New York to become an officer in the NAACP). Black artists, Robeson told Wilkins, “ought to do as many things as they can do well. Very few singers, perhaps none, can sing German lieder like Roland Hayes. It would be foolish for me or anyone else to say that Roland should not sing German lieder. But I do contend that Negroes should not run off and leave severely alone their own peculiar gifts which none but they can do perfectly.” It bothered him, he told Wilkins, “that very little of what I actually say gets into the papers—and I mean great dailies as well as the Negro weeklies.” He also told Wilkins that he had decided to live in Europe, where one didn't need friends “to act as ‘bumpers' against prejudice.”
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Meanwhile, in London, according to the rather studied accounts in Essie's diary, she was seeing quite a bit of Noel Coward. She spent the evening of her birthday with him at her flat (his birthday was the following day), and he had become a confidant in her troubles with Paul. Essie may have wanted Paul to think that Coward's “marvelous” attentiveness was a sign of something more than friendship. In a letter to her in January, Paul wrote:

I had a talk with NC. We talked frankly as he said he knew all the facts. I left my position very clear—that I am very anxious to marry, etc. He thought that rather inadvisable from career angles—but appears to understand. I couldn't gauge him very well. He was non-committal, and rightly so. After all, his business with you is your concern, not mine. He was very nice. I had lunch with him at the Ritz. We had a long chat, he
is
delightful.…
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In that same letter, written about a month into the three-and-a-half-month tour, Paul reported that it “has been rather trying.… What I really need is about 3 months out to do nothing but learn new songs.” He was feeling “rather sad and lonely,” in part because “I don't like the American scene so much” and in part because “everyone was rumoring over [our] separation. One or two people asked me directly. I denied any such thing. Thought it best for you to handle same as you think best.” Essie had already cautioned the Van Vechtens to “let Paul open the conversation about all this. He might be offended if he thot [sic] I had told you, first. I know he will tell you, so all you have to do is sit and wait.” But Paul did not, as Essie had expected, confide in the Van Vechtens. When they let her know that he had “said nothing whatever about the situation,” simply indicating that she had stayed behind because of health and would be joining him later, Essie chose to interpret that as meaning “definitely I think, that he does not want a divorce, and hopes that I do not,” and that “he evidently means” to ask her to come over—“So, it all sounds lovely.”
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Essie did come to New York in March, but the news immediately leaked out to the press that she was staying not with Paul at the Hotel Wentworth but with her old friend Hattie Boiling at the Dunbar apartments. The
New York News and Harlem Home Journal
in a three-inch headline announced, “
ROBESONS SEPARATE,
” and in the story inside quoted “friends” of the couple to the effect that “a beautiful English woman enamored of Robeson followed him here” and “the battle is now raging … between the two women for Robeson's affection.” Essie put the issue more casually in her diary, describing her month-long stay in New York as a round of parties and adventures. She went with Minnie Sumner to see Noel Coward in his hit play
Private Lives
, “stopped traffic” at the NAACP annual ball at the Savoy by arriving with Coward as her escort (“Noel danced with me often. He was conspicuously attentive … to the confounding of all those present”), went to Washington for two days, where she picked up again with her old beau Grant Lucas (“At last we have had our talk—after ten years—and I find I haven't changed a bit toward him, nor he toward me.… He is terribly attractive, and I think he likes me all over again”). She also took a side trip to Columbia, South Carolina, to gather material for a new book she was planning about her family and her early life (“Talking about southern hospitality … I've never seen anything like it”). She and Paul did spend his birthday together, going to the theater with the Van Vechtens and spending the night at the Wentworth. But that one evening aside, they scarcely saw each other.
⁴⁸

When Essie sailed on the
Leviathan
for England on April 15, her old friend Corinne Wright and Grant Lucas saw her off. At the last minute, Paul, too, came along. “The representatives of the Negro press,” Essie wrote Grace and James Weldon Johnson, “looked positively disappointed
when they saw Paul arrive with me at the pier, and they solemnly watched him see me off properly. We had to laugh. They insist upon separating us, bless em, but we have other plans!” Yet, a few months later, when drawing up another general indictment of his behavior, Essie rebuked Paul for having appeared at the sailing. “Grant and Corinne were too well bred to show their surprise, but you can imagine how Grant felt.” Grant stayed to say a last few words, and after the ship pulled away Essie memorialized his “sweet face” in her diary: “He has done a great deal for me in this last week, has helped me find myself in many, many ways. I shall always be grateful to him for that.” From shipboard she wrote the Van Vechtens that she was “still thrilled over the heavenly time I had in America. I can't remember ever having had such a perfect time in my whole life! Honest.” She was now convinced that “everything is going to come out beautifully for me”; she still had “no idea what Paul will do, but no matter what he does, we are fast friends, and understand each other better than ever before.” Besides, she felt rid at last of “a lot of silly young ideas I used to be boarded up with,” and “surprised at the great variety of ways in which I can have a good time. I am having a really good time for the first time in my life. And if I'm happy and he's happy, things are bound to come out right in the end. I'm not at all impatient, because I'm amusing myself.”
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There matters stood for the next six months. Paul returned to London soon after Essie and immediately went into rehearsal for a revival of O'Neill's
The Hairy Ape
, under Jimmy Light's direction, and with Robert Rockmore (an American lawyer whose wife, Bess, had been a Provincetowner) as producer. It was to be a short-lived venture. “The rehearsals nearly killed me,” Robeson later told a reporter. “I am supposed to be a strong man. Yet I couldn't stand up to the strain on my physical strength. When I came to the first-night I had no physical reserve left.” Essie went to the dress rehearsal and “was a little worried about Paul's voice. He is using much too much voice, and if he keeps on like this, he will strain it.”
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Yet the opening went off marvelously—for Robeson, not O'Neill. With only two dissents, the critics hailed his portrayal of the shipboard stoker Yank as “splendidly vital,” asserting that he had “never been more effective.” In a fine display of traditional English homoeroticism, the
Graphic
's critic devoted a fifth of his review to waxing eloquent over Robeson's physique: “That Mr. Robeson should be stripped to the waist is my first demand of any play in which he appears. Perhaps one of the disappointments of his Othello was its encumbrance with the traditional dress-gown.” Most of the reviewers dismissed the play as “sentimental,” “grotesque,” and already outmoded in its once-fashionable “expressionism.” A number of the critics, while exonerating Robeson personally, considered it a mistake to have cast a black in a role originally written for a white. “It upsets the balance or alters the whole direction of the piece,” wrote the reviewer in the
Star.
“One cannot help thinking that here is
something which has to do with racial consciousness and the oppression of the negro.” Essie agreed that Paul had been “magnificent” on opening night but was angered at the presence of Yolande Jackson, who had sat in the front row of the stalls “with a French count—no-account looking. I never saw such nerve in my life,” Essie huffed in her diary.
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After five performances, the play abruptly closed. “Laryngitis” was the umbrella explanation given out to the press, but Paul's symptoms were in fact more extensive than that. Essie wrote the Van Vechtens that the strain of “a packed concert tour followed immediately by an intense rehearsal period” had exhausted him; he “began yelling, and after opening on Monday night, had to [be] put to bed in a nursing home on the following Friday, suffering from strain, nerves, laryngitis and no voice at all. The doctor kept him in bed a week, treated him with inhalations, etc. and ordered complete rest.” This bout of “nerves” conceivably marked the onset—the first symptomatic evidence—of the depressive disorder that twenty-five years later would overtake him.
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When reporters asked Robeson about his future plans after the closing of
Hairy Ape
, he alternately replied (or was variously misquoted) that he would not act again for several years, that he hoped to start a repertory theater in London, that he wanted to go to Africa, to return to Germany, to retire for a while to the provinces to learn Russian. He did begin learning Russian in earnest, taking up formal study of it with the composer Alexandre Gambs, and telling the press that he was finding it “extremely easy to learn the language” and that Russian music suited his voice—perhaps, he thought, because “there is a kinship between the russians and the negroes. They were both serfs, and in the music there is the same note of melancholy touched with mysticism.”
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Essie scorned his “indecision” about implementing plans and announced that she was applying for a Guggenheim to visit Africa on her own. She lectured him that the “inglorious” ending of
The Hairy Ape
resulted from his typical inability “to make up your mind about things—about your work, about your life.… You hadn't the guts to say
no
in the first place—or having said yes, you wouldn't face it and buckle to it and do the thing properly. No—you hem and haw and postpone the evil day, and if something turns up to decide or help or hinder you, you remain quiescent. You only really work or fight if you are pushed back into a tight corner. It's the same about your life. You want Yolande, you don't want me.… But do you do anything about it? No. You want us both. Or rather you don't want me, but you don't want to give me up. It's ridiculous and childish.”
⁵⁴

Essie, as usual, was judging the surface—seeing it lucidly but not penetrating beneath. She was always able to describe behavior accurately but then gauged its meaning narrowly, tending to assume that things
are
what they appear. Judging people by what they
did
, she equated that with
who they
were
—it was a major difference between her temperament and Paul's. He was indeed “taking his time,” willing to let the appearance of vacillation—a real enough aspect of his behavior, but misconstrued as a summation of it—serve as a useful disguise. To protect himself from Essie's overly zealous scrutiny, her relentless demand to be “up and doing,” he found it convenient to cultivate the appearance of irresolution—it kept her, and most of the world, from invading his complex privacy, even though it opened him to charges of being a dawdler. He might have smiled, rather than felt annoyance, at Essie's description of him to Larry Brown as “a very strange person.”
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