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the oppressed, which has always registered in his singing of Negro Spirituals extending to colored races and suffering minorities everywhere. His art was always the bridge that led to the fertile encounters with strange men. Russia, with its mingling of races with its many colors of skin"which counted no more than the color of an eyebrow" was an almost planetary experience.

But the times moved on, and in 1940 when the Russo-Nazi pact was signed Robeson felt the tightening of his American ties, had to return home and accept in a new way - whatever the cost in daily comfort - his fate as an American Negro. Far removed by his experience, his culture, his fortunes from the struggling young colored artist who had gone to London in 1928, he and his wife, Eslanda Goode, an American of Spanish Negro descent, whom he had married during their student days at Columbia, now established their residence at Enfield, Connecticut, in a spacious colonial house. Their only child, Paul Junior, returned from Russia where he had been at school for several years, at present attends High school in Springfield, Massachusetts, near Enfield. "Paulie" is sixteen, his father forty-five at the height of his powers.

These powers have registered in many-ways - in concert and Radio singing, in work for the war effort, singing for soldiers all over the country, including the South, in speaking against Anti-Semitism, in Movies, in the theatre. But the climax of Robeson's American life to date, is his appearance in the great tragic role of Othello under the auspices of the Theatre Guild. Broadway's first Negro Othello, Robeson's

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compelling portrayal of the Moor of Venice has made Shakes-
peare a "smash hit" for the first time in many a season.

Robeson has been dreaming of this role since his twenties. He played it in London in 1936 and tried the play outside New York last year. His eloquent, almost touching unbitter unviolent reading of the part of the Moor as a noble simple-hearted general arisen from the ranks of the underprivileged, all too easily deluded by that sharp sophisticated Iago, a man of the ruling race, is symbolic to the brimming audiences. Othello murders almost blindly for love's sake, then repents dolorously and dies for love's sake. Whether or not this reading of Othello is the final one, it has made Paul Robeson the most famous and authoritative American Negro.

When I first met Paul Robeson and undertook to write his story for a liberal weekly, he was twenty-seven years old, not yet famous, poor, struggling, full of young idealism, living in a small Harlem flat up a lot of flights of stairs. I remember his crowded, bare little living room with an upright piano taking up most of the space. There Lawrence Brown - today still his gifted Negro accompanist - played the accompaniment to his Spirituals which rolled out of his broad chest and uplifted throat with the instinctive finality of an animal cry heard afar. Primitive singing, the voice of the sorrowful and lowly, the content of the Spiritual filled the room.

In a scene in *The Emperor Jones* where he sang, - instead of whistling, as the script required - the quality of his singing voice emerged dramatically. Soon he was giving a recital of Spirituals and his fate was sealed.

As Robeson had both the voice and the stage presence for opera, both his Negro and his white backers put on pressure at this time to get him to cultivate his voice, for opera roles. He refused flatly, reserving opera arias for the bath tub as he said. He did not hold opera higher than folk singing, he just did not want to be a concert singer of classic European music, even a distinguished Roland Hayes. Having heard him sing *the* same part of *Boris Goudonov* at the Stadium not long back I asked Robeson if he had ever sung the role in opera. He said no, nor did he wish to. "But Boris is folk opera with the melodies of modern speech, at that" he said "anyone who can speak Russian can sing Boris."

We were talking during his actor's breakfast in a sophisticated modernist room on Murray Hill, which did not resemble in any way the Harlem flat where we had first met. Robeson the star has never lost his human simplicity. Served by a gentle colored maid whom he called "Miss Alice", running upstairs in a couple of strides now and then to answer the telephone, he told me the story of his life from the time the former story I had heard - and written - had left off.

In that year Paul Robeson had gone to London with a play called "Black Boy" which failed. He then went with his manager Varney, and Brown, to Paris, "hoping something good would happen." Nothing did. "This was the lowest moment of my pro-

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fessional career. I practically starved with Brown in Paris. At my concert which was to be a great artistic event, much heralded, I had a cold and the French were disillusioned. Then my boy was born and I returned to the United States - because Mrs. Robeson was ill and to find money for Brown's fare home," added the singer who was soon to be getting $2500 for a concert. He got back just too late to sing Old Man River in *Showboat*, but did play the part of Crown in *Porgy*, which increased his American name. He gave recitals again and in the summer of 1928 went with the second *Showboat* company to London.

This was an immediate hit, a tremendous hit and was followed closely by a concert at the Drury Lane, which proved one of the greatest successes of Robeson's artistic career. Overnight, as it were, the color line was gone and Robeson's charm and power as an artist had made him not only a conspicuous figure in the cultivated musical world of London but an idol of Mayfair. The English social elite sought him out, invited him as a house guest to their great mansions and country houses. He was asked often to sing for the Duke and Duchess of York, now the King and Queen of England. What a fate for a Black Boy! He decided to make his home in London and brought over his wife and son. Such a sudden shift of fortune might well have turned any artist's head, made his ego flap its wings. I asked Robeson how it was. He looked thoughtful then amused.

"Sure - I did think I was a 'hot guy' for a bit. Yes, I had two or three years of 'Bein' Sump'n'," he said honestly.

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"I was off the beam, from my real point of view. But 1932 and the rise of Hitler brought me back to myself." The bearded Robeson of today was very serious about this. He keeps the Othello beard in private life instead of taking it off with his gilded Moorish robes, and it somehow seems symbolic of his present stature as sage and thinker.

"This English experience made a tremendous difference to the Robeson family," he said looking down the long room to a lighted portrait of a distinguished and beautiful woman, the wife I had met in the early days. There had been a few troubles at one time but they had not lasted.

Besides the elimination of the color line "once and for all" Robeson had experienced in England a backing which he had appreciated for his wish to remain a folk singer. "The English did not think I should be a finer singer if I sang opera. They took me as the equal of say, Heifetz in my own field."

He also did plays and musicals: For instance: *All God's Chillun*, with West Indian boys, - British citizens - as co-actors. *Stevedore*, with Negro caste; a play based on the life of Toussaint 'l'Ouverture. But the most important role was *Othello*, in 1936. An Othello, he believes, less well played than now and more violently.

"But I was not only an artist in London," said Robeson though that was always the means and the mainspring. A part of the maturing process was the development of a fine intellectual life as well. After all, I had been trained as a lawyer, and with the rise of Hitler, with London in ferment, the Chamber-

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lain Government temporising and floundering I found myself in
touch and in sympathy with the Opposition to this Government -
the socialist-minded Morrison, Bevin and others now in the War
Cabinet. I began speaking against the Chamberlain Government.

Men like Cripps, Laski, Shaw, the Webbs—even Churchill whom
he used to meet socially now and then,—made a point of asking
the American Negro artist leading questions about American Negro
policy, about his views on colored minorities generally. "They
took my answers very seriously. They regarded what I said as
having political importance. My social and political thinking
deepened and grew enormously between 1933-40 and I acquired a
very concrete sense of personal responsibility." He was asked to
attend a special session of the House of Commons on one occasion.

In groups of this sort, not just leftist or socialist groups
but liberal in Forums and universities where he was invited to
speak, Paul Robeson met professionally trained and educated,
cultivated colored men of other races - East Indian, West Indian,
Maylasian, African. Africa had always drawn him because of his
own origins and as he came to know the educated African at Ox-
ford or Cambridge or at the Oriental Institute in London where
he studied languages his interest in his "blood cousins the
Africans" grew, and he was forced, as it were, to learn more
of his African roots.

In 1935, he went to North Africa, in 1936 sent his wife and
son there. The experience was crucial for them all. From then
on Africa was, so to say, the focus of his thinking. Beside
the problems of one hundred and fifty million Africans the
problems of the American Negro gained in perspective! With his

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gift for linguistics, deriving in part from his musical ear
but amounting to genius, he was quick to acquire two African
dialects, "American Negro speech, I found, has the cadence of
the African languages." Certain of the cultures like those of
Nigeria and Uganda were of a high order, he found could be
compared to the Mayan and Aztec of our continent. Nothing
stirred an American Negro audience more than to hear that
an African tongue may be as expressive as Greek. Robeson
began to write in English weeklies and magazines, comparing
the African to other cultures, and his wife, who went to a
school of Anthropology started a long work on the subject of
Africa which is on the way to completion now.

But meanwhile another change had come in Robeson's think-
ing, from the simple fact of going to Wales to sing. Immediately
he felt a great emotional affinity for the Welsh people, and
they for him. He sang for them, they sang for him, and suddenly
he was one of them, realising their suffering in the mines, their
bad social situation as if it were his own. They were no better
off, though white, than the Southern Negroes, he felt. "They
felt my problem as their own, too. Here were white people who
suffered, I had run into a class problem for the first time in
my experience. Now I knew I must not just think in terms of
color, how to improve the status of the colored races, I must
think in terms of the poor of England, of suffering peoples
everywhere."

Robeson described as one of the most moving experiences of
his life a driving trip across Wales, with the people coming to

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their doors to welcome him, calling him Paul, asking him to have
tea in their cottages. Music had done it all - the Spirituals
had done it. He was even asked to be a solo singer at the great
Welsh annual song-fest the Estedfod, where nobody but a Welsh-
man had ever sung.

"This had a profound effect: I could never think in terms
of color any more," He said his own American people were always
wanting him to be a Negro Nationalist, - to work and sing for
Negroes only. But he was now thinking in terms of the poor
whites of the world, including those of our South.

In 1934 he thought he should look at Russia. He went as a
tourist, not to live and purely as an outgrowth of his life in
England. Every year thereafter til 1938 he took his boy to
school there, for even in England he might strike the race
problem. M

"In Russian" the big enlightenment was to find a nation
of peoples of many colors, including white, to whom the
difference of color was no more important than the color of
an eyebrow. "It was like another planet."

Robeson said he was "profoundly affected from all angles."
The Russians were not only tackling the problem of poverty in
a fundamental way, but in one single generation had wiped out
the whole background of prejudice against the Jews. Men of
the Soviets are fined and imprisoned (he said) if they use bad
names for Jews. But they don't - in one generation education
has changed the situation, so terrible in the Pogroms. One
generation from the Pogroms to freedom! "I revised my views of

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the American Negro's suffering from the Pogroms - what is our lynching compared to the Pogroms? In the South, too, evolution may come more quickly than is believed."

Robeson said here - with some emphasis - that he belonged to no party. He believes the revolution to be over in Russia, and that the country is seeking to build up a good life for her own people. He looks to the destruction of Fascism in the war, the collaboration of forces and conceives that when Fascism is destroyed, "society can go ahead in an evolutionary manner." If Fascism is defeated he is convinced there will be a Progressive Europe but not communism.

"Without reservation my roots are among my own people, but I have my roots also in the progressive labor movement - I come from laboring people and my sympathies are with the oppressed peoples of the world. And I feel from my observation and experience, that all peoples have potentialities - none are ipso facto inferior."

In 1937 Robeson went to Spain to sing for the Anti-Franco soldiers. "It was a great educational experience to see war, and the terrible suffering of the Spanish people. Many decent people I knew in England were pro-Franco. This was a class struggle, and in Spain I was taken as a political figure as well as an artist."

"I came back to the U. S. A. with considerable sacrifice, with the sure conviction that the fate of the Negro is tied up with the fate of minorities everywhere," he said "and to find serious racial problems here at home." If asked if art had

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become secondary to these problems.

He wouldn't say so, always he would seek to do his very best as an artist. "But the fact is an artist of distinction is given a chance to speak." "Music is a world language, it has social meaning. In my art I would today choose the most effective medium - I would prefer *Othello* to the *Emperor Jones*. I would choose my medium to suit my purpose. The implications of my work to Negroes are of primary interest." He might sing a Spanish folksong, then Steal Away to Jesus, then the Red Army song on one program. It was provocative to combine Anti-Fascist with classic songs, "Lord God of Abraham Turn your hearts in another direction."

Above the couch were Robeson sat were bookshelves full of small Grammars published by the London Oriental Institute, which has worked out brilliant methods of teaching languages. "I like to take languages apart". He had won Honors in Greek and Latin, learned French and German at Rutgers. Spanish, Portugese, Norwegian, Czech, Russian, Chinese, Persian, Hindustani, and the African dialects - these he has now, and is going on to learn one of every group of languages - next Arabic, Hebrew, Finnish. The heart of most days after his midday meal, is absorbedly spent working at some new language, listening to linguaphone records on his Capehart. After the language is essentially learned he calls in some native teacher.

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"Studying and reading Pushkin whom I love has had much to do with my appreciation of Shakespeare." His Russian according to Russians is perfect, in Chinese he speaks the Peking dialect, reads the characters, can read Confucius.

"Vocabulary is one of my greatest aesthetic pleasures."

Robeson the linguist is a passionate scholar, but one feels that he is moved not only by words but by the urge to communicate, to reach without intermediary the hearts of brother men.

His major interest, he says, outside Othello - which is likely to run for a long time - is his work on the *Council of African Affairs*, an American organization. "Tribal cultures are all related, - what happens to millions of colored people in Africa, India will affect profoundly the American Negro" he said quietly.

Robeson has returned to his country a world citizen in the truest sense. Mellow, seasoned, poised, responsibly aware of the influence he wields, generous in expressing himself. Enough factual, emotional experience, enough adventure, observation, vision and success to fill the lives of ten white singers come with him. He belongs to these times as if made for them. He looks to the post-war world hopefully, constructively, even as a place of redemption and when he speaks of it, the poets' fire, the prophets' fervor break through.

A white writer who recently spent a week-end in a