The Martin Duberman Reader (20 page)

The world has never had much tolerance for those who persist in arguing unseen possibilities against the abundant evidence of their eyes, for the champions of what might be as against what is. The powers that be, bent on inculcating narrow-gauged formulas about the “necessities” of human nature—and human society (on the acceptance of which the continuation of their hegemony depends) must always vilify those purveying a more sanguine message. This
is not to say that Robeson never dealt in simplicities but, rather, that those making the charge usually did so on the basis not of greater sophistication, but of competing simplicities.

When Khrushchev revealed the full extent of Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress, early in 1956, Robeson read the complete text in the
New York Times
and put down the newspaper without comment. As his son Paul Jr., recalls, “He read it, he knew it was true,” but “he never commented on it to my knowledge in public or in private to a single living soul from then to the day he died”—nor to his most intimate friends, Helen Rosen, Freda Diamond, and Revels Cayton. As early as the thirties Robeson had had some knowledge of the purges, and in the late forties some of his friends—Itzik Feffer, for one—had disappeared. He possibly regarded the trials of the thirties, as did many of those who were pro-Soviet, as necessary reprisals against the malignant “intrigues of the Trotskyists,” believing that subsequent reports on the extent of the purges were exaggerations designed to discredit the Revolution.

He also adopted the standard argument “You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs,” justifying the purges as
occasional
injustices, as the inevitable excesses inherent in any effort to create a new society, the excesses to be excused, if not sanctioned, on the basis of the principle that collective welfare takes precedence over the rights of individuals. Robeson would have approved the analogy offered by Andre Malraux: though Christianity has had its murderous inquisitions, few have demanded that Christians abandon their religion because of its past depravities. Still, Khrushchev's revelation of the sheer number of Stalin's crimes, his policy of
systematic
murder, shook the faith of many in the eggs-omelet analogy; and it suggested to some that brutality may have been endemic to the centralized authoritarianism that had come to characterize the Soviet system, displacing its earlier, visionary ideals.

There is no evidence that Robeson either disputed the accuracy of Khrushchev's revelations or discounted reportage of them in the Western press as exaggerated. His reaction
probably
—this must remain
a “best guess,” given the lack of concrete evidence—fell into the middle ground of disappointed acceptance: disappointment that the socialist experiment in which he believed had been derailed by the acts of an unsound leader, acceptance (and continuing faith) that in the long run the derailment would prove temporary and that socialism, still humanity's best hope, would triumph. Even this much he could have said had he wanted to clarify his position publicly. But he chose not to, chose silence instead, preferred to be called a stubborn dupe—naive at best, criminal at worst—rather than join the growing legion of Soviet detractors, rather than become himself (as he saw it) an obstacle to the eventual triumph of socialism.

However naive his continuing faith may have appeared to the world at large, it was an accurate reflection of one strain in Robeson's complex personality. While he essentially trusted no one, Robeson had, at the same time, a fundamental belief in the decency of most people, and held to the sanguine view that they were potentially as generous, as aware and as concerned about the sufferings of mankind as he was. He expected much of others—as he did of himself. He'd never learned as a youngster, as had almost all black Americans, to deal in limited expectations; treated in his own family like a god, he'd met in the outside world far fewer institutional humiliations than afflict most blacks attempting to make their way. Ingrained optimism had become a characteristic attitude; he expected
every
set of hurdles, with the requisite hard work and determination, to be cleared as handily as those of his youth had been.

But Robeson was hardly naive. Even as a young man he'd experienced enough discrimination in his own life, and seen enough desperation everywhere around him in the black world, always to have carried with him the knowledge that society was cruel and individuals frail. When awareness of the brutalities of daily life further deepened in adulthood, however, and disappointments over political attempts to mitigate them continued to mount, Robeson could somehow never entirely digest the world's bad news. “He was a softie,” the black trade-unionist Sam Parks remembers with reproving admiration. “He never wanted to hurt anybody—it used
to make me mad at him.” With time, Robeson came to temper his faith only to the degree of accepting the view that social transformation would be a longer process than he'd originally thought simply because human nature had been more disabled than he'd once assumed. But he did remain full of faith—faith that one day humanity would rise to its better nature, that a cooperative social vision would supplant a ruthlessly competitive one, that human beings would somehow turn out better than they ever had, that the principle of brotherhood would hold sway in the world. There was no other attitude—with disappointments on every hand—that would have allowed him to persevere. Nor one, resting as it did on accumulated denial, more likely in the long run to produce an emotional breakdown (as it did).

Robeson's political identification was primarily with the Soviet Union in its original revolutionary purity, and not with its secondary manifestation, the American Communist Party. On the most obvious level, he was never a member of the CPUSA, never a functionary, never a participant in its daily bureaucratic operations (he told a close friend that its internecine warfare and rigidity made him miserable). He was a figure apart and above, his usefulness to the Party directly proportionate to the fact that his stature did not derive from it. The Party, as Eugene Dennis's widow, Peggy Dennis, has put it, “was just a small part of Paul's life.” “I have a hunch,” Dorothy Healey, the ex-Communist leader in California, has added, “that 90% of the inner-C.P. stuff was either unknown to Paul or, if known, considered unimportant.”

He'd aligned himself with the Soviet Union by the late thirties because it was playing the most visible role in the liberation of American and colonial peoples of color; he'd aligned himself with the principles of black liberation and socialism, not with national or organizational ambitions. From his early visits to the Soviet Union, he'd taken away the overwhelming impression of a nation devoted to encouraging the independent flowering of the culture of different peoples—including nonwhite people—within its borders, a policy in basic opposition to the “melting-pot” view for which the United
States officially stood, The socialist principle could in practice be sabotaged or misdirected—as it was in the Soviet mistreatment of the Crimean Tatars—but to Robeson the principle remained uniquely attractive.

Despising American racism and viewing the Soviets as the only promising counterbalancing force to racism, Robeson was inclined to look away when the U.S.S.R. acted against its own stated principles, to look away fixedly as the perversions multiplied over the years, discounting them as temporary aberrations or stupidities ultimately justified by the long view, the overall thrust, the “correct” direction. Explaining Robeson's view (and her own), Dorothy Healey describes him as “well aware” of the Soviet Union's “terrible weaknesses” but nonetheless convinced that “it's going in a direction that you think is a proper direction. . . . You never settle it once and for all,” but “you're not going to get caught in the company of the anti-Sovieteers.” In ex-CP leader John Gates's comparable if more bellicose version, Robeson took “the classic point of view that all of us did. . . . This is a revolution, and you have to fight all kinds of people in revolutions, and sometimes innocent people get killed. It's a war.”

—from
Paul Robeson
(1989)

B
y 1933 Lincoln Kirstein's long-simmering search for a way to establish a classical ballet company in the United States picked up steam and intensity. In mid-May, he went up to Hartford to see his friend Chick Austin, the youthful head of the prestigious Wadsworth Atheneum, who showed him the half-completed new International Style addition to the museum; Lincoln noted in his diary that “his little auditorium is perfect for small ballets.” Chick, like Lincoln, was a serious advocate of the arts and an audacious innovator. As director of the Atheneum, he'd transformed Hartford's reputation as the stodgy headquarters of the insurance business into an important center of cultural ferment.

Lincoln knew that although Chick was married, his erotic preference was homosexual, and he hinted to Lincoln, who also preferred men, about having recently indulged in “some highly irregular pleasures,” saying that he'd tell him more some other time. Most people saw Chick as a charming, engaging, outgoing man, but Lincoln had a far different take on him. He intuited “glimpses of acute hysteria, like lightning in his conversation; a person of many splits whose energy could collapse at almost any moment, I think, if he was either confined or pressed. Really vicious: that is, unimaginative, morally repetitious and lazy.” Lincoln's chief interest in Chick was to get
him involved in some way, somehow, with his ballet plans. Lincoln suggested that the Atheneum host a “Ballet Demonstration,” which he thought he could arrange for the following year. It was an idea Chick apparently “warmed up to.” Lincoln said he'd provide more details soon.

Lincoln's interest in the ballet had initially quickened on his various trips as a teenager to Europe, where in 1929 he'd seen Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Since then, with Diaghilev's death in that same year, the ballet world had become rent by factions. A number of émigré artists had been trying to lay claim to his mantle, and to find venues, patrons, and, they hoped, companies that might make their existence less precarious. George Balanchine, who'd been Diaghilev's last important choreographer, succeeded in putting together a group called Les Ballets 1933, a young company of some fifteen dancers, including Tamara Toumanova, Andre Derain, and Roman Jasinski. None of this would have come to pass had it not been for the events of a decade earlier, when Vladimir Dmitriev, a former baritone in the Mariinsky Theatre opera company, successfully engineered exit visas from the Soviet Union for a small group of artists, the so-called Soviet State Dancers. Among them were Balanchine, his first wife Tamara Geva, and Alexandra Danilova, who would become his “unofficial” second wife.

When in Europe during the summer of 1933, Lincoln—twenty-six years old at the time—met with Balanchine, and the two had “a long and satisfactory talk” in French; Lincoln thought him “wholly charming.” A few days later, they had lunch, Balanchine arriving nattily dressed in a gray flannel suit, “his strong, delicate Caucasian face very animated” (as Lincoln wrote in his diary). They talked in some detail about the possibility of an American ballet, with Lincoln briefly mentioning Chick's museum at Hartford as a possible site. “We got frightfully excited about it all,” Lincoln wrote. “I visualized it so clearly. He wants so much to come . . . says it has always been his dream. He would give up everything to come.”

Lincoln then got “frightfully worked up” and, able to “think of nothing else,” sat down and wrote his now-famous sixteen-page
letter to Chick. It began with a grand theatrical flourish: “This will be the most important letter I will ever write you . . . my pen burns my hand as I write: words will not flow into the ink fast enough. We have a real chance to have an American ballet within three years' time. When I say ballet, I mean a trained company of young dancers—not Russians—but Americans with Russian stars to start with.” Years later Lincoln claimed that he'd deliberately chosen “an optimistic style” in writing to Chick. But “calculated optimism” doesn't begin to capture a tone that singes with ardent intensity. Lincoln's words leap off the page with an almost libidinous passion. “You will adore Balanchine,” he tells Chick. “He is, personally, enchanting—dark, very slight, a superb dancer and the most ingenious technician in ballet I have ever seen.” Then, knowing his audience, Lincoln appealed to Chick's homoerotic side by describing the likely male star, Roman Jasinski, as “extremely beautiful—a superb body.”

There had been earlier attempts to find a home for ballet in the United States, but although Anna Pavlova (from 1910 to 1925) and a few other internationally famous stars, as well as Diaghilev's Ballets Russes on its 1916–17 tours, had successfully drawn audiences, there'd been few opportunities to study classical technique and a scant tradition of indigenous choreography. Lincoln insisted to Chick that their planned-for school “can be the basis of a national culture as intense as the great Russian Renaissance of Diaghilev. We must start small. But imagine it—we are exactly as if we were in 1910. . . . Please, please, Chick, if you have any love for anything we do both adore, rack your brains and try to make this all come true. . . .It will mean a life work to all of us [and] incredible power in a few years.” He assured Chick that he was not being “either over-enthusiastic or visionary.”

But of course he was being both. Drunk on possibilities, perhaps feeling it might be now or never, Lincoln couldn't help throwing caution—along with absolute truthfulness—to the winds. Even if he'd been capable of a more modulated tone, it might not have appealed to Chick's own audacious nature. Bravado and amplitude
were mother's milk to both men. If Chick was going to bite, the nervier the vision, the better.