Withered Roots

By Stefan Kanfer

PAUL ROBESON

by Martin Bauml Duberman

Knopf; 804 pages; $24.95

The Rutgers class of 1919 had big plans for its valedictorian: by 1940 he would be Governor of New Jersey and "leader of the colored race in America." As Martin Bauml Duberman observes in his compassionate biography, extravagant predictions were still being made for Paul Robeson 21 years later. The son of an escaped slave had already risen to international celebrity as a singer, actor and public speaker, and no limits were set on his future. Hardly anyone foresaw that he was standing on the edge of an irreversible decline.

The roots of this catastrophe can be traced to the moment that Robeson fell in love. The affection was not for his forbearing wife Essie, or for Peggy Ashcroft or Uta Hagen, or for any of the other strong-willed women with whom he had affairs. Robeson was smitten with the Soviet Union. During a 1934 visit, the singer proclaimed that in the U.S.S.R. he felt "like a human being for the first time since I grew up."

By then Robeson had collected enough grievances to fuel a revolution. In high school one of his teachers thought Paul "the most remarkable boy I have ever taught, a perfect prince. Still, I can't forget that he is a Negro." Neither could the college football players who reviled him, or the secretary who warned the young law student, "I never take dictation from a nigger."

Robeson doubled his fists, abandoned his studies and entered the concert hall by the stage door. His rich interpretations of spirituals rapidly brought him to London in 1930 as Othello and to Hollywood five years later in Show Boat. But the rewards could never assuage the early injuries.

Duberman, a professor of history at Lehman College in New York City, is a scrupulous biographer. But he seems an ingenuous historian. In his view, Robeson became the target of "Cold War hysteria," and the sad outcome of a brilliant career was, in essence, "America's tragedy." But in fact, the wound was self-inflicted. The champion of minorities and laborers turned out to be oddly forgiving about crimes against humanity -- provided that they were committed in the Workers' Paradise. To him, Stalin's infamous purges were a $ proper way to deal with "counter-revolutionary assassins." The pact between the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany was excused as a "defensive" act.

Robeson's rhetoric intensified after World War II ("It's up to the rest of America when I shall love it . . . in the way that I deeply and intensely love the Soviet Union"), and in 1950 the State Department revoked his passport. He made new enemies when he accepted the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952. White enthusiasts dropped away, joining a series of black spokesmen who had given him their backs. The head of the N.A.A.C.P. pronounced him "more to be pitied than damned."

In the '60s, leaders and laws changed, but the restored passport and the nostalgic concerts came too late. By the time of Essie's death in 1965, Robeson's resonant bass had become a memory, and his health had broken down. He died in 1976 at the age of 77, after suffering from a long-term mental illness. One of his last visitors was told "not to talk politics of any remote stripe." That advice is still valid. Stalinism remains the performer's central flaw, and no posthumous reasoning can excuse his special pleading for one of the century's monsters. Paul Robeson's greatest role is his earliest one: the triumphant symbol of talent and will over racism. Duberman's massive work shows how durable that part remains. Those who want a briefer version may find it in a tribute of 25 monosyllables by a black prisoner in the Marion, Ill., penitentiary:

They knocked the leaves

From his limbs,

The bark

From his

Tree

But his roots

were

so deep

That they are

a part of me.