Paul Robeson (94 page)

Ultimately, and for other reasons entirely, Robeson's trip to India did not come off. On the day the Robesons were due to leave London, Essie, packing up Paul's suitcases, went to get his passport—and discovered it was lost. She spent hours searching the flat without finding it, and became “panic-stricken”—a rare state for the unflappable Essie. She decided to wake Paul. He took the news calmly, called Harold Davison to see if he had forgotten to return the passport (he hadn't) after taking it to secure a work permit. Paul then helped Essie search the flat again, without success. By then it was time to leave for Prague, where Paul was booked for television and radio performances on Christmas Eve. They telephoned Prague for advice and were told to forget the passport and to try to make it through. British Immigration officials at the London airport cooperated, letting them board the plane after hearing their tale of woe.
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Then, an hour into the flight, fog descended, closing the Prague airport and forcing the plane to land in Zurich. Swiss Immigration agreed to let the Robesons spend the night, but by the next morning the fog had thickened and all airports in Czechoslovakia were shut down. Getting on one of the few planes leaving for London, they landed—after a hair-raising trip—at Southend, outside London. Immigration officials recognized Paul and gave him an emergency entrance permit. The next day Essie took the flat apart room by room, drawer by drawer, file by file—and finally found the precious passport. She sat down in the middle of the floor and cried. On December 29 the weather cleared and the Robesons—too late for his
engagements in Prague—took off by jet, along with Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham, for Moscow. Du Bois, aged ninety, had also gotten his passport back and had begun to travel extensively. When he had arrived in England (where he and Shirley had stayed for a time with the Robesons) in August 1958, the
Daily Worker
had reported that Du Bois viewed “his own persecution with a calm detachment. But as he speaks of Paul Robeson his face becomes angry. ‘What they have done to Paul has been the most cruel thing I have ever seen,' he said.”
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New Year's Eve in Moscow was a formal affair, with engraved invitations to dinner at eleven in the Kremlin. In the tapestry-hung reception room, Khrushchev and other Presidium members greeted the guests, who were then ushered into the marble Georgian Hall, where long tables had been spread for a feast. Robeson spotted Du Bois and Shirley, who were habitually early and already seated. Both men stood up, and as they made their way toward each other, weaving through the crowded tables, people stopped talking to watch them. When they embraced in the middle of the banquet hall, the entire crowd, including Khrushchev, stood and applauded; after a moment of stunned surprise, as if noticing for the first time where they were, Robeson and Du Bois broke into laughter. At exactly five minutes before midnight, Khrushchev proposed a toast, the lights dimmed, and suddenly—as Shirley Du Bois described it—“all around us snow seemed to be falling, the Christmas tree of many colors gleamed, and then far up in the Kremlin tower we heard the solemn, slow striking of the clock.… When the last stroke died away, the orchestra played, all the lights blazed and an array of butlers bearing large, silver trays began plying us with food. Ulanova danced, the Oistrakhs, father and son, played, and when the performing artists appeared together on stage for the finale, two of the opera stars unexpectedly went out into the audience to where Robeson was sitting and led him back up to the stage. The orchestra struck up ‘Fatherland' and Robeson's voice ‘boomed out as he led the chorus.'”
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A few days later Robeson came down with yet another cold. This time there was an added complication: unexplained bouts of dizziness. Simultaneously, Essie began to have uterine bleeding and went in for a curettage. It revealed “an irregular arrangement of cells” that the doctors diagnosed as a “precancerous condition of the mouth of the uterus.” They recommended that she enter the Kremlin Hospital for treatment, but before doing so she persuaded them to let her return to the hotel to collect her things and to help Paul pack for his scheduled trip to India on January 12. She found him not only feeling a lot worse, but also having failed to call a doctor as he had promised. “I was waiting for you to get home,” he told her—“Can you imagine?!” an indignantly pleased Essie wrote Marie Seton. Essie promptly got a physician to look him over. A consultant was then called in, and the doctors told Paul he had to be hospitalized immediately.
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He refused. He was scheduled to perform in concert that same day, and in the evening was due to leave for New Delhi; he wanted, characteristically, to honor his commitments. (“Paul has the duty idea in a very bad form,” wrote a disapproving Essie; “he has a very great dread of disappointing people, and once he promises anything, he will do it or drop dead.”) The next day he felt still worse, becoming “frightfully dizzy” whenever he tried to get up. He confessed for the first time to Essie that he had often been dizzy before and had had spots before his eyes at concerts. He also confessed that he had been feeling under “continuing strain,” concerned that he might not be able “to do all the things he finds himself agreeing to do”; the worry “has got him down.” Fearing a stroke, Essie suggested it was “the perfect time for us to step off the merry-go-round, and collect ourselves and re-organize our lives, especially our health.”
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Another consultant was called in and also insisted that Paul go to the hospital. “Scared,” he “listened meekly” and finally consented. And so, on the morning of January 12, 1959—the day they had intended to leave for India—Paul and Essie were both admitted to the Kremlin Hospital, he into a private room on the fourth floor, she into similar accommodations on the second. When it was announced that Paul would not be performing his scheduled concert that day in Moscow, rumors flew that he had somehow been injured. A crowd gathered at the Metropole Hotel, where the Robesons had been staying, anxiously inquiring about his health, asking what might be done to help, dispersing only after officials reassured them that Robeson was in good hands. Paul cried when told of the crowd's distress and concern.
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He was given a battery of tests. Initially there was some worry about a possible heart condition, but finally his low blood-pressure readings and continuing dizziness were ascribed to an “acute state of exhaustion.” The doctors insisted on a total rest for a minimum of ten days, probably longer, which precluded the trip to India. Paul turned “mulish,” Essie reported home, but the doctors, seconded by Essie, finally managed to persuade him that the changes in climate and water, “not to say anything about the enormous strain of another National Welcome,” would affect his health for the worse. On January 14 Essie herself began therapy, having radium inserted into the mouth of her uterus, requiring that she lie still for twenty-four hours after each treatment. For the first two days of hospitalization, she had gone up in the elevator to visit Paul; now, when she was prostrate, he came down and watched television with her (including the sessions of the Twenty-first Party Congress). On the days she was allowed up, Essie worked away at her typewriter—eventually turning out no fewer than ten articles during her hospital stay.
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Next came the problem of what to do about
Othello
, scheduled to begin rehearsing at Stratford in mid-February. Robeson had had reservations
about playing the role from the beginning, apprehensive that after so long an absence from the stage he would fail to measure up to what was being widely billed as a “historic” event and the “jewel in the crown of his career.” As bouts of dizziness continued in the hospital, Essie reminded him that
Othello
demanded “sudden, vigorous brave moves and strides” and insisted it was “madness” for him to undertake the part. Paul finally agreed to cancel, and Essie so notified Glen Byam Shaw, who at first tried to recast the role but then cabled Robeson begging him to reconsider (“I implore you Paul to help me or [the] Stratford season will be ruined”). He promised to adjust rehearsal and performance schedules in such a way as to minimize all strain on him.
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By then Paul was feeling considerably better, and getting restless. On February 5 he left the hospital for a month's stay at Barveekha Sanatorium, the plush rest home for government officials and distinguished foreign visitors, while Essie stayed behind for continuing radium treatments followed by a gamma-ray series as an additional precaution. At Barveekha, ice skating and a careful diet further increased Paul's zest (though failing actually to reduce his weight). Mulling over Shaw's offer, he began to view it as an opportunity to get back into harness on terms that would minimize risk to his reputation. He would be able to concentrate—with due advance warning to colleagues and the press—on the vocal aspects of the role, the aspects he felt most comfortable with, and to minimize the physical movement, with which he did not. With the burden now “on other shoulders, not his,” as Essie explained it, the essential responsibility would be “with them, and they will be very grateful if he just appears.” Paul wired Glen Byam Shaw his acceptance. Shaw was ecstatic; he even promised that special light costumes would be designed so that Paul would not “have to carry a lot of weight.” Paul now looked forward to the engagement, “not with dread, as before, but with anticipation and interest.”
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On March 9 Robeson left Barveekha for London. “I think everything will be fine,” Essie wrote Sam and Helen Rosen, “if he just doesn't beat his brains out with the extra curricular activities.” Always eager to spare him whether he wished it or not, Essie put off telling him until the last minute that she would have to stay behind in the Kremlin Hospital; the doctors were pleased with the results of the radium and gamma treatments, but wanted her to complete the series before joining Paul in Stratford later in the month. Met at the London airport by reporters—who noted his weight loss and thought he looked older than his years—Robeson took the occasion to say that he thought his performance as Othello would now have to be a “muted” one, and to thank the able team of Soviet doctors who had looked after him and the many well-wishers who had sent encouraging messages. He added good-humoredly that “many people seemed to be more worried” about the effect of the illness “on my voice than about me,” and apparently “wouldn't have minded if I had to crawl
back from Moscow on crutches, just as long as I can still sing.” Essie, writing privately to Paul, Jr., struck a less wry and more overtly angry note: “I mean to begin to preserve the Robesons first, and then do what I can for everybody else. If that's not political maturity, then write me down as an
INFANT,
period. Everybody else nearly got us killed once, and I say
NEVER NO MORE.
Which does not mean I am signing off, but it does mean I'm cautious, as from now.… People!!! I'm thoroughly disgusted. Not even an ‘if you are well enough,' or ‘if you are not tired,' merely please, please, please, you owe it to the cause, etc. And there are about ten causes. Sheer disgusting exploitation.”
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With the April 7 opening less than a month away, Robeson went straight to Stratford to begin rehearsals. He was accompanied by Joseph (“Andy”) Andrews, who since the early days in England had served him both as valet and friend. At Stratford, Robeson moved into a suite of spare rooms in a large converted farmhouse in Shottery, on the outskirts of town. It was owned by Mrs. Whitfield, described by her son-in-law Andrew Faulds (an actor who later became a Labour Party member from Stratford) as “a very old-fashioned sort of English lady, conservative with a small ‘c' and totally unaware politically.” Unexpectedly—to her family—she became “devoted to Paul,” enamored of his “extraordinary courtesy and good manners”; she developed immense “respect for this man, and she had had no knowledge of him, either as an artist or a politician.” When Robeson was not rehearsing, he lived as a member of the Whitfield clan, wandering into Mrs. Whitfield's sitting room for a chat, relaxing in the garden with Faulds and his wife and the two other Whitfield daughters, Mary and Thisbe. When Faulds talked politics with Robeson, he got the sense of, “well, ‘melancholy' is the only word, of disappointment, of profound disappointment in how things had happened in the world … an immense awareness of the intractable bloody problems of the world at large.” But “the overall feel of Paul in Stratford was of personal happiness.” Among other things, he had a brief affair during these months, which he remembered with great tenderness. Robeson was, in several ways, enjoying a restoration.
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The twenty-seven-year-old director, Tony Richardson, had won instant fame for his vivid, brisk staging of John Osborne's path-breaking play,
Look Back in Anger
. In turning his hand to
Othello
, Richardson cast in a contemporary spirit, choosing Osborne's wife, Mary Ure, to play Desdemona, and the American actor Sam Wanamaker for Iago, but he interpreted the text conservatively. Ignoring the revisionist and iconoclastic views of the critic F. R. Leavis that
Othello
is the story of a self-dramatizing narcissist, Richardson settled instead for the traditional view of Othello as the Noble Moor brought down by the machinations of an alien world. This romantic Moor—steadfast, dignified, honorable, put-upon, loving—is almost certainly the only kind of Othello Robeson had any interest in playing,
or could play. And it was in the mainstream tradition of recent Stratford Othellos—of Godfrey Tearle in 1948, Anthony Quayle in 1954, and also the portrayals of Richard Burton and John Neville in alternating performances of Othello and Iago at the Old Vic in 1956. Not until 1964, at the National Theatre of Great Britain, would Laurence Olivier attempt a “Leavis” Othello—and triumph.