Paul Robeson (31 page)

Paul moved into bachelor quarters in London, leaving Essie the elaborate flat they had recently taken on Buckingham Street, and, accompanied by Ethel A. Gardner (Larry Brown was in the States), did considerable concert work locally. Essie had to postpone her trip to Africa after suddenly hemorrhaging in June, and she went off to spend the summer in Kitzbühel, Austria, with Ma Goode and Pauli. But she took ill again in August and had to be rushed to a sanatorium for what seems to have been an abortion—or a curettage following an abortion she may have had before leaving London. She and Paul had continued infrequently to sleep together, but she might have gotten pregnant by Grant Lucas while in the States, and she had also been seeing fairly regularly—and possibly having a sexual relationship with—a man named Michael Harrison. In any case, when she went to Austria she went armed with a letter from Paul addressed to a Dr. Lowinger in Vienna in which he refers to Essie's “present pregnancy,” expresses concern for her health after the dangerous delivery she'd had with Pauli, and requests Lowinger, if he agrees that it “would be unwise for her to complete the term,” to “arrest the pregnancy at once, or as soon as you feel it would be advisable.”
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Paul wrote her in late August saying he was “really very tired and very unhappy and am very anxious to see the boy and more anxious about your health,” sending her money and urging her to see Dr. Lowinger. “If we decided to go ahead with things sometime,” he remarked about her pregnancy, “we must be very careful and give every possible chance from the first. Which, I am afraid, during the Period of Possibility will have to exclude foreigners (Verstehen sie).”—perhaps a reference to Michael Harrison—“One can be just so liberal in such important matters.” He assured her again that he was “really very devoted”—“love you very much in fact—much more than I ever did and miss you beyond words.” Essie wrote the Van Vechtens, once more sounding the patronizing maternal note, “Big Paul isn't very well, and not very happy, bless him. I think he has growing pains. But he is a dear, and we are great friends. When he has quite decided in his own mind what he wants to do, we can come to some sort of decision ourselves, and some plan.” Meanwhile, she wrote, she felt “a little guilty being so happy, and so busy.” She does seem genuinely to
have enjoyed being with Pauli in Kitzbuehl, and enthusiastically recorded her son's doings and sayings—he was “so brown,” she wrote to Grace Johnson, “with so much red in his cheeks, and perfect teeth, and carries himself like a king.” In September she took herself to Vienna for another “procedure”—its exact nature unspecified, even in her diary (suggesting, once again, that it was not entirely designed as a private document).
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Essie returned to London in early October. By then Paul had resolved to marry Yolande. While in New York he had seen Freda Diamond—who over the years had become a confidante and an anchor to him—and discussed his feelings for Yolande; she had advised him to go ahead with the marriage if he had his heart set on it. He now wrote Freda to say, “I trust I am going to great happiness, and I miss you dreadfully.” That juxtaposition of sentiments was entirely typical: in his emotional life Robeson would not conform to traditional expectations that love (and sex) must be single-minded devotions, that only one person at a time must be the focus of desire. As he further elaborated to Freda: “… we must never lose the lovely feeling between us, only strengthen it.… Remember that this feeling between us must go on as it always has and will deepen and deepen significantly. You shall never hear things about me—I shall tell you, and nothing can in any way disturb us. I shall tell you … because of that in me which is yours.” Paul again told Essie that he wanted to be free, and they again discussed divorce. This time Essie finally agreed—“we are both quite happy and pleased over the prospect of our freedom,” she wrote in her diary—and they proceeded to see a lawyer. Cordiality reigned. While Paul and Larry rehearsed in the Buckingham Street flat, Essie got together some dinner. Paul scrubbed her back in the tub while she got ready to go out with Michael Harrison, he confiding the hope that Peggy Ashcroft (so at least Essie recorded in her diary) would “stop telling the world she was in love” with him or “it would cause all sorts of upheavals and scandals,” she laughing and saying, “It was all due to his devastating charm with the ladies.” He left their tub-side tête-à-tête to take Yolande to the theater for her birthday.
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A week after that enlightened exercise in togetherness, Paul canceled his Albert Hall concert because of the flu, took to bed in his hotel, and wouldn't let Essie visit. “Paul is behaving very, very strangely,” she wrote in her diary, and complained to the Van Vechtens, “It does seem too bad that he won't be reasonable. But I am not allowed to tell him not to go to parties just before a big concert, as I used to, so he just goes and does these things, and gets into trouble.” She decided Paul was “certainly degenerating!,” having fallen prey once more to irresolution. “He can't seem to make up his mind what to do about his work, about his life, about me, and Yolande, nor anything. He really will have to settle down and get busy, if he wants to hold his place. Poor fellow,” she wrote in her diary. “I'm sorry for him.”
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Essie decided to sketch out a lengthy letter to him. In the no-nonsense manner on which she prided herself (and in which she thought Paul woefully, perhaps morally, deficient), she laid out options, imposed conditions, drew up systematic conclusions. “My dear P,” she began. “I don't seem to be able to talk to you any more. We don't seem to speak the same language. So I thought I'd better write.” She was now entirely prepared, she continued, to give him a divorce, should he want one. “I shall be infinitely better off divorced from you, than married to you.… As your wife, I have rarely had the supposed pleasure and comfort of your company—except at very irregular meals and at odd hours late at night; and of course on those social occasions when you found it convenient or necessary.… All I really lose when I divorce you, is a job; and divorces being what they are—I lose the job but keep the salary, with a raise.”
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She then reiterated her charge that he was a deficient father, uninterested in his own son, and defended herself from his long-standing complaint about her extravagance. “You deplore the number of menages you must keep up,” but seem unwilling to forgo separate quarters and conveniently to forget that “the reason we sent Mama and Pauli abroad was because you didn't want your child so much in evidence before your two ladies and before your public. A child is an encumbrance when one is playing the great lover.” She then broadly hinted that “Andy” (Joseph Andrews), a Jamaican whom Robeson employed as a valet-secretary but who was really more of a friend, primarily served to abet his adventures. “I must say I feel a little bit embarrassed for you,” Essie wrote, “when you identify him as your secretary. Andy can't write a dignified intelligent letter, he can't answer the telephone with dignity and intelligence, and he is inefficient, unpunctual and unreliable. How can he be a secretary, then? When you tell people he is, they think … it must be some special arrangement.”
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As for Yolande, Essie had “thought a great deal about this racial mixing business” and concluded that, “when a white woman takes a Negro man as a lover, she usually lowers him and herself too; white people and Negroes feel rather that she has a bull or a stallion or mule in her stable, her stable being her bed of course, and view the affair very much as if she had run away with the butler or the chauffeur; she is rarely—almost never—a first-class woman, and neither white nor black people think the Negro has won a prize.” In her own behalf, Essie objected to the way he had publicly flaunted his affair with Yolande, and his “lack of taste in emphasizing” the gifts Yolande had given him of a cigarette case, a locket, and a seal ring. She compared him in this regard to Leslie Hutchinson, the popular black musician, who took “pride in displaying presents from white women.”
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“I daresay,” she continued, “you will feel I am a stickler for dignity. Well, in a way I am. For instance, there's the matter of Yolande hanging over the railing conspicuously from the stage box at the premiere of Othello; and sitting in the center of the front row of the stalls at the Hairy Ape. In your magnificent selfishness, I suppose it never occurred to you that I might be embarrassed? And that her trying to be conspicuous was in the worst possible taste? … Funnily enough, since your audiences are always mostly white, she who wants to be conspicuous is just another white woman, and no one knows the news; when you marry her she will still be just another white woman.… You say in your large way, that English women don't know the first thing about how to make love. You are very funny, honey. And you say they haven't suffered! All your intimate information seems to have come from middle class Anglo-Indians—and you know what the English think of them! … If you had ever seriously tried to make love to me, I'm sure I don't know what might have happened. But we needn't worry about that—you never did. You made a pass or two at it—took me to a theater and were very pleased with such evidence of your devotion. I was too—which makes it even funnier. [I] seriously doubt if you were ever in love with me. You liked me, were companionable, and I was thoughtful and considerate of you—so you like me. I doubt now if I was ever in love with you—I admired you tremendously, and I was certainly interested in you.”
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But the past, she concluded the letter, “is behind us. The question is, what should we do with the future? I know what I want to do, and shall do with mine. There is no indecision about me, as you know. But about you—you have a great natural gift, and a magnificent body, neither of which you have done anything to preserve and improve.… You also have a terrific charm—but have rather overworked that. You have a fine mind. You have, as I said in 1921, the immediate possibility of becoming the greatest artist in the world—if you want to; and it wouldn't take much work, either—you have so much to start with.” Driving home her point, she reiterated her view that if he was ever to realize his potential, he would have to decide what he wanted to do and stick to it. “If you continue to drift along as you are doing now, refusing to face things out, you will degenerate into merely a popular celebrity. Which seems poor stuff when one thinks of being a really great artist, the thrill of having done something perfectly.… You can jeer all you like, but I remember vividly your elation when you had given a really fine concert.” “Well,” she closed, “it does seem that I fall naturally into place in the role of lecturer, doesn't it? All I can say in my defense is that I have decided what to try to make of my own life, and as we part, I should be very happy to know that you have decided upon something for yourself. I do so hate waste. And you will be a wicked waste if you don't step on it.”
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On the evening of November 28, Paul dropped by the flat to leave a Russian dictionary (Essie had also taken up the study), found she had gone out, and saw the pencil draft of her letter to him. Apparently it moved him, and he returned the next morning to have a talk with her. As she described it in her diary, it turned out to be “a red-letter day for me, perhaps one of the most important days in my whole life.… We got closer and more friendly than we have been. He says he wants to see me often, and urgently, and that we have something between us which no one else will ever be able to duplicate. He thinks he wants to marry Yolande, but he isn't sure, but he is sure he wants us always to remain close and friendly.… We had a lovely time, slept together, and enjoyed it enormously. I'm so glad things are pleasant and friendly. Most important of all, he has found his feet, so far as his work is concerned, and is through with slacking and sliding and muddling through. Thank God for that!” She sent a high-spirited version of their new arrangements to the Van Vechtens: “He doesn't live here of course, but has reached the regular and often calling stage, which is much more inconvenient. He is a dear, tho, I must say, even tho he is so funny and serious and absurd at times. I think no matter what happens to him, and I'm sure a great deal will happen to him, he'll always be a very nice person.”
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That same week Essie, on a dare, consulted Madame Maude, a psychic. She liked what she heard. Her marriage, Madame told her, was not a “real” one, but her next one would be—“to a man who has to do with the control of many men … in a large building—perhaps in government,” and she predicted vast changes in Essie's life within the next few months, changes that would come about as a result of her own “creative work.” Essie decided at once to finish up the film scenario she'd been working on, converting it into a novel called
Black Progress
, and to complete her modern-day parody play based on
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, a “comedy with music” about the tour of a black jazz band in Europe. She was still more excited about her prospects after Nell St. John Ervine, a clairvoyante, gave her pretty much the same reading Madame Maude had. “She said she saw me parting with a tall, dark man, turning away for good.…” When, two days after that, a third psychic, Mrs. Mohamed Ali, whom Larry Brown set high store by, read her cards and told her yet again that she would divorce Paul, would remarry happily, and would “meet great success” through her work, Essie was elated at the thrice-repeated fortune.
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Just before Christmas, Ma Goode and Pauli arrived in London for a visit from Kitzbühel. In a hired Daimler, Paul and Essie went to Victoria Station to meet them, and Paul leapt from the car when the train arrived and hoisted Pauli to his shoulder—they “seemed very happy together,” Essie wrote in her diary. On Christmas Day they had a family dinner, and after it Paul took Pauli to the Palladium to see
Peter Pan
with Jean Forbes-Robertson.
On December 29 he again spent most of the day with the boy, then left in the evening to go out with Yolande. The following day Paul sailed alone on the
Olympic
for another tour of the States. He stopped at the flat early in the morning to say goodbye to Essie and Pauli, while Yolande waited downstairs in her car to drive him to the ship in Southampton.