Paul Robeson (99 page)

On March 27 Essie had another call from Moscow. Paul had slashed his wrists.

CHAPTER 24

Broken Health

(1961–1964)

They couldn't tell Essie much when she arrived in Moscow. There had been a noisy party in Paul's hotel room the night before; at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. students had still been asking for his autograph; he had retreated into an inner room. His translator, Irina, had found him in the bathroom, his wrists slashed with a razor blade. (Two years later Robeson told a doctor treating him in the GDR that in Moscow “people whose parents or whose relatives were in jail had approached him—‘Can't you help me?'—this sort of thing had put him into conflict.”) Who had been at the party? When had Paul slashed his wrists? At what hour did Irina discover him? How close was Paul to death? All this remained unanswered (as much of it still is) when Paul, Jr., arrived in Moscow a few days later. Deeply suspicious, he sought a logical explanation from officials. Some of the guests, he was told, “were not Soviet people”—enough innuendo to feed his suspicions but not to clarify them. If there was anything mysterious, or possibly sinister, in the circumstances surrounding Robeson's attempted suicide, those who had had recent contact with him provided scant elucidation. Harry Francis expressed surprise that Robeson had left London without a word to him. Ivor Montagu, who had by chance ended up on the same plane to Moscow with Robeson, recalled his surprise at the sudden agitation he had shown during the flight—earlier he had seemed “fine”—when a Good Samaritan sitting behind him (and a stranger to Robeson) had offered him his overcoat against the cold weather.
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A team of Soviet doctors headed by Dr. Snezhnevsky offered the diagnosis “depressive paranoic psychosis generated by an involutional form of arteriosclerosis,” and prescribed Largactyl and Nosinan, commonly
used tranquilizers. According to Paul, Jr., the doctors told him that his father “had been so paranoid when first admitted that he thought they were spies and were going to kill him, and was yelling that Essie was a spy, too. For the first few days that Essie tried to visit him, Paul wouldn't see her.” By the time, Paul, Jr., saw his father, Robeson was able to converse with clarity. But he chose, as was his style with matters of deepest import, to say nearly nothing. Paul, Jr., later ventured to ask him why he had done it; the guarded, mysterious answer he got—according to Paul, Jr.—was that “someone close to me had done irreparable damage to the U.S.S.R.”
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A rumor has persisted, alternately, that Robeson himself had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union. But those who knew him best stoutly deny that intepretation, and, indeed, scant evidence has surfaced to support it. Robeson's disillusion, such as it was, was not with the U.S.S.R. per se but with the way the world worked, its refusal to adhere to a historical process that had seemed predetermined. His sense of blighted hopes, personal and historic, is readily documented, but was generalized—not reducible to any specific disappointment with Soviet policy or development. Robeson's forlorn sense of loss was more encompassing, and one contributing factor may well have been “chemical”—a bipolar depressive disorder that fed on political events and largely expressed itself through them but was finally more than their sum. On the other hand, without the accumulated pressures of government harassment and worldly disappointments, any underlying depressive tendency might never have become manifest. Further, almost anyone subject to the kinds of pressures Robeson was—even without an organic “predisposition”—might have become susceptible to breakdown. It may well be that all Robeson himself knew about his deepening sense of malaise was what, accompanied by tears, he had once told his Chicago friend Sam Parks: his moorings had slipped—abroad he now felt himself a stranger in unfamiliar territory, at home he felt himself bypassed by a civil-rights movement he had done so much to forge.
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Paul, Jr., continued to search for clues to corroborate his own view that his father had been “neutralized” by malignant unknowns, possibly CIA agents, at the “wild party” preceding the suicide attempt. He used his connections within the CPUSA to gain access to someone on the Soviet Central Committee and to a representative from the Security Division; his frantic pursuit produced only circumstantial clues, but did dangerously increase his own level of anxiety. Twelve days after arriving in Moscow, he himself broke down. Terror-stricken, hallucinating, he heaved a huge chair through the plate-glass windows of his hotel room and nearly threw himself after it. Himself hospitalized, in his view a second victim of those responsible for his father's collapse, he assigned the same cause to his own: chemical poisoning by the CIA.
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Within a few weeks both father and son were doing notably better—
playing chess, taking long walks, following (Paul, Sr., reluctantly) the prescription of the Soviet doctors for regularized calisthenics (a prescription Sam Rosen, for one, thought lamentably inadequate). In consultation with Essie—who as always had responded to crisis by redoubling her energies and burying her doubts—they decided to give out minimal information. Even to intimates like his brother Ben, his sister Marian, Helen Rosen, Freda Diamond, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Essie sent the same message (embedded in lighthearted letters otherwise full of casual chitchat and breathless excitement over Yuri Gagarin's recently completed mission into space): after years of overwork, compounded by “a slight heart attack,” Paul's health had given way; he had fallen “flat on his face with exhaustion” and his doctors had bedded him down for a long rest; Paul, Jr., had been sent for as a precautionary measure, because of his father's “heart attack.” As to Paul, Jr.'s own condition, no elaborate word was necessary, since no elaborate rumors had leaked out; not even his wife, Marilyn, was informed of the full extent of his collapse, and his uncle Ben and the others were merely told he had come down with “a stomach upset.” Essie delayed sending out most of her letters for over a month—until Big Paul was feeling well enough to append a few reassuring lines of his own (“Feeling much better. Soon back to normal”), thereby, it was hoped, giving further weight to the official version they had concocted. To those making business or professional inquiries, Essie merely replied that, because of overwork, Robeson's doctors had insisted on a rest period of several months.
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And, indeed, within a month of the attempted suicide he was feeling much improved and the doctors were much encouraged. Both Pauls, with Essie in attendance, were transferred to the Barveekha Sanatorium for further rest, and by early May, Paul, Jr., was writing Marilyn that his father was “in a relaxed and even carefree mood,” their shared cottage luxurious, and the surrounding grounds lovely. Essie took advantage of the medical facilities to have a complete checkup of her own, and the doctors found no signs of any recurring cancer. By mid-May, Big Paul was occasionally trying out songs on a piano and was feeling well enough to receive the Chinese Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. for a brief visit. By the end of May, Essie felt able to fly to London to pick up needed clothes, supplies, and typewriter from the flat; when she returned to Barveekha ten days later, she found both men so improved that the doctors decided to push forward their discharge dates. Paul, Jr., flew home to the States on June 2, and the following week Essie and Paul, Sr., were allowed to return to London on the promise of a prolonged rest free from commitments.
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After arriving back at Connaught Square on June 10, Robeson began working for an hour or so a day with Larry Brown on their music (“The Voice sounds unimpaired,” Essie wrote Helen Rosen), and gave some renewed thought to a trip to Africa, bolstered by a personal letter from Kwame Nkrumah inviting him to assume the recently created chair of
music and drama at Ghana's University of Accra (he also got an invitation from Cheddi Jagan to come to British Guiana, in South America, as his personal guest). The good cheer lasted less than two weeks. Robeson's mood took an abrupt turn downward, and Essie made a split-second decision to get him back into the hospital in Moscow. A worried Shirley Du Bois reported to Freda Diamond that mutual friends had seen Paul “being
carried
from the plane,” on landing in Moscow, “by two whitecoated male nurses, one on each side.” Essie again put the best face on it to correspondents: they had been “hasty” in returning so soon to London and for caution's sake had now gone back to Moscow to ensure an absolutely “solid” convalescence. “Hearts are strange things,” she wrote Shirley Du Bois in one of the emblematic lines of her life, “and I respect them.” Hearing of Robeson's setback, Dr. Du Bois wrote him a charming letter explaining that he had been in Rumania for a month getting (at age ninety-three) rejuvenation treatments from the famed Dr. Asian, but was getting “bored”; he asked Robeson to kiss the stones of Moscow and greet all his friends, announcing himself “fed up” with an “impossible” America and expressing the hope that he would soon see Robeson in Ghana (where Du Bois was shortly to take out citizenship). Essie at first admitted to Paul, Jr., and Marilyn that she was “seriously discouraged,” yet within two weeks was again sounding a positive note (“All is very well now, and on the way
UP”).
Bob and Clara Rockmore asked Essie, with considerable heat, to let them know “in plain English just what's what,” promising not to divulge to anyone what they were told. She would not, continuing instead to send chatty, uninformative notes that reaffirmed her ability to keep a confidence—and to enjoy the secondary satisfaction of being in absolute control of an incapacitated Paul.
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The same tactics failed to work on Helen Rosen. Receiving a note from Essie on July 31 that the doctors were “
VERY
much pleased with [Paul's] progress” and that they would be at the Barveekha Sanatorium for another month or so to consolidate his improvement, Helen and Sam decided to have a look for themselves. They were already in nearby Rumania to attend a medical conference. (Sam's now renowned stapes surgery had brought him international attention, and Helen had trained in audiology in order to assist him in the operation; they were traveling widely to demonstrate the procedure.) In mid-August they arrived at Barveekha for a four-day stay. Helen was appalled at what she found. Paul was utterly lethargic and passive, as if drugged, and Essie's singsong attempts to rouse him—“Let's show Helen and Sam how nicely we do our exercises”—only added to the poignancy. “They gave one look at him and guessed,” Essie reported back to Paul, Jr., and Marilyn—that is, guessed
“SOME
of the story.” Essie encouraged the Rosens to believe that the breakdown had happened only after the second trip to the Moscow hospital, that it duplicated “the 1956 experience” (his first breakdown), that it
was the byproduct of “nervous exhaustion and tired heart”—and said nothing at all about “the ideas” (as she cryptically referred to them to Paul, Jr.) he had expressed during his least lucid days. The Rosens resented not having been told the truth before, but after Essie assured them that Big Paul had been “adamant” about not letting anyone but himself tell his story, they said they “understood.” When they left, four days later, Essie wrote home that Paul was “so sad … I may have to bury him tomorrow.…”
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By the second week in September, after a three-month stay, Robeson was again improved, and the Barveekha doctors decided to risk letting him go back to London, urging that if all went well he should eventually return to his own country. “So hold onto your hats,” Essie wrote the Rosens just before boarding the plane for London. Her augury proved all too apt; Robeson had barely been in London forty-eight hours when he again relapsed, this time suffering his most serious episode yet. The usually unflappable Essie put in a panic call to Helen Rosen in New York: could she come at once to London? Helen dropped everything, took the next plane, and arrived in London the following morning. She found Paul huddled in a fetal position on the bed, tangled up in the bedsheets, “positively cowering” in fear. Essie, in consultation with Paul's agent Harold Davison, made arrangements for Paul to enter the Priory, a private facility that had the reputation of being the best psychiatric hospital in England.
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The Priory sent out a five-passenger car and two orderlies, one of whom, a Mr. Williams, “beguiled and soothed” Paul into the back seat, with Essie and Helen on either side of him. They drove out from London toward the Priory in Roehampton, hoping he would stay calm during the half-hour trip. But when the car approached the Soviet Embassy and Paul (according to Helen) “thought we were driving in there,” he started muttering, “You don't know what you're doing, you don't know what you're doing”; then, as they drew opposite the Embassy, he frantically signaled them to “get down!!”—implying, Helen felt, “that great danger was at hand.” He pushed her down on the seat, leaning over her with his body as they drove past. “He was frightened,” Helen recalls, “cowering himself and trying to protect me.” She didn't know which building they were passing until Essie told her it was the Soviet Embassy, without adding any other comment. To this day Helen remains “astonished” that Paul knew where he was, given the terrible shape he was in—“He just suddenly came to.”
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At the Priory he was put under the care of Dr. Brian Ackner, assisted by Dr. John Flood, both highly regarded specialists. Ackner, co-author of a classic paper on insulin coma, has been described by a contemporary specialist as “a first-line authority” on mental illness at the time. It was Ackner's view that Robeson suffered from “one of those somewhat rare chronic depressions which fail to respond to any therapy or continue to
relapse but which in the long run have a good prognosis.” He was supported in that view by Professor Curran of St. George's Hospital, who was later called in for consultation, and by Dr. Flood, who chose the words “endogenous depression in a manic depressive personality” to describe Robeson's underlying condition. Examining Robeson on the day of his admission, September 15, Ackner found him “in a depressed, agitated state with many ideas of persecution,” expressing “ideas of … unworthiness which, although they may have had some basis of reality in the past, were quite delusional in the degree to which they were held.” Ackner decided to begin a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—brain seizures triggered by electric currents—immediately. In Western medicine in the early sixties, ECT was the preferred treatment for “major depressive” illness. Twenty-five years later, it remains a standard weapon in the medical arsenal, but the doubts of some experts about its possible culpability in memory impairment and even brain damage have made ECT more controversial than it once was; the development of alternate drug therapies since 1965 has further reduced it to the status of one among several possible—and hotly debated—treatment options.
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