The black and the red
Anne Chisholm
PAUL ROBESON by Martin Bauml Duberman
Bodley Head, £20, pp. 804
For once, the overkill school of Amer- ican scholarly biography is justified. Paul Robeson, the black actor and singer whose allegiance to communism wrecked his career, needed, and has found, a bio- grapher without preconceptions or axes to grind, with the stamina to conduct a massive research operation and the sense to allow the tragic, resonant story to unfold without much comment. It is impossible from his text to guess what colour Profes- sor Duberman is (white) or even what sex. His politics are virtually invisible. His book will give support neither to those who regard Robeson as a martyr nor to those who think him at best a fool, at worst a puppet.
For the first half of his life, it looked as if Robeson could, by a combination of natu- ral gifts and luck, prove that being black in the United States was not necessarily a bar to success. His father was born a slave in North Carolina, but worked his way north and became a minister; thus Paul was born in 1898 in New Jersey, not the retarded South. His mother was a teacher. Robe- son, their youngest child, was highly intelli- gent, handsome, likeable and a brilliant athlete. He also learned early, after his mother died when he was six, how to control his feelings. This was just as well; as Duberman points out, during the years that Robeson was winning all the prizes in high school and at Rutgers, and excelling in the .college football, basketball and debating teams, blacks in the southern states were being lynched at the rate of around two a day. Robeson himself, 'a dusky marvel' or 'the big dal ky' as the sports reporters called him, was subjected to insults and brutal attacks by opposing teams. When he graduated in 1919, the class prophecy was that by 1940 he would be 'the leader of the coloured race in America'; but after taking a further degree in law at Columbia he went to work for a prestigious white law firm in New York, where a secretary told him she would not take dictation from a nigger. He and his wife Essie, a dynamic, ambitious girl he married in 1921, decided that a career as an actor would be a faster and less humiliating route to the top.
During the 1920s and early 1930s, Robe- son became a huge international star on the stage, in the cinema and as a singer. In New York, the Harlem Renaissance was booming, and the Robesons were taken up by its leading white patron, Carl Van Vechten (author of Nigger Heaven). He was especially lionised in London, where he stopped the show with 'Old Man River' and was asked to sing at parties by Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Philip Sassoon, and Irene Ravensdale. He was a memorable Othello to the young Peggy Ashcroft's Desdemona in 1930. His only child, Paul Jr., was born in 1927; the Robesons set up house in London, but the marriage was in trouble. Robeson was always attractive to women and not monogamous by nature. In both New York and London he became involved with white women as well as black, several of them well-connected and rich. Duberman deals with Robeson's love affairs fully but calmly; the marriage adapted, and lasted till the end.
By the mid 1930s Robeson, like many others, was increasingly drawn towards the left. For all his stardom, he was still frequently insulted because he was black, and segregation was still entrenched in America. One of the virtues of Professor Duberman's biography is that it is uncon- spiratorial. The stupidity and tragedy of Robeson's involvement with communism and the Soviet Union came about because of who he was and the times he lived in, not as the result of a plot. Robeson was not the only public figure to visit Russia in the 1930s and fall for the notion that here was a free, hopeful, non-racist society. The Rus- sians feted him as eagerly as the British, and convinced him that the peasants, so recently serfs, were soul brothers and that communist Russia was the best hope of oppressed peoples everywhere. They hardly needed to trap him; he wanted so badly to believe, and to belong.
For a while, he got away with it, travelling and performing between East and West. Robeson was everywhere in the front line of fashionable anti-fascism, with his huge warm presence and his wonderful voice. In Spain, he sang for the Lincoln battalion of the International Brigade. After America entered the war in 1942, Robeson was on the crest of the wave. Playing Othello again on Broadway, he was also singing patriotic songs and making speeches full of hope for the postwar world, where blacks would be respected, colonies free, and all men brothers. After the war, everything went wrong. Russia became the new enemy and Robe- son found himself on the wrong side, with the FBI tracking and taping him, and his colleagues in the black movement turning against him on communism. Duberman does not let Robeson off too lightly; pride made him determined not to listen to the truth about Stalin even when it was shown to him by Russian Jews inside Russia itself. In 1949 he sang a song in Moscow for them, but he would not take up their cause in public. Instead, he made a disastrous speech in Paris in which he advised black American soldiers not to fight in an anti- Soviet war.
Over the next few years, Robeson en- dured a series of attacks and humiliations spearheaded by Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Commit- tee. In 1950 his passport was withdrawn; his career and his earnings dwindled. Mainstream black leaders disowned him; his fans were afraid even to play his records; he was burned in effigy. Maltreat- ment in America only made him more obstinate; even after the revelations at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 he would not say a word against Stalin.
By the time the US authorities, after an embarrassing international campaign, re- turned Robeson's passport in 1958, he was 60. A serious depressive illness had over- taken him after an operation in 1956; in 1960, after a triumphant return to Europe and Russia he had another breakdown from which he never really recovered. Driven by fear of disappointing his audi- ences and letting down his race, he forced himself to keep up a punishing program- me of travel, concerts and lectures. In 1961, in a Moscow hotel, he attempted suicide. Back in London, on the way to a hospital for shock treatment, he became so terrified driving past the Soviet Embassy that he hid on the floor of the car. Rumours circulated then and since about the cause of Robeson's breakdowns; it was suggested that both the KGB and the CIA might wish to poison him, or that his ovjn guilt at realising but not admitting Stalin's monstrosity had driven him insane. Duber- man airs all the theories but reckons that Robeson was most probably undermined by an organic weakness, compounded by the extraordinary pressures and demands of his professional and political life. He returned to America and died in 1976.
Duberman's book is very long (550 pages of text, 250 pages of notes) and surely definitive. He has had Robeson's family's help and full access to the enor- mous Robeson archive. The biography is also, in its slow way, gripping and power- fully moving. He has put Robeson back where he belongs, both a hero and a victim in the sad, ugly story of 20th-century racism and political confusion. The most touching and revealing lines are perhaps a rare diary note made by Robeson himself: 'I do hate it all so at times.'
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