Paul Robeson: A Biography.

WHAT SORT OF Communist was Paul Robeson? Well, he once had a passionate affair with a more-or-less upper-class English actress. When she made amorous advances to him in the back seat of a limousine, he was embarrassed at the presence of the chauffeur; she mocked his concern. Her contempt for the chauffeur alienated Robeson, by reminding him of the way Negroes had been treated in the South. He went back to his wife.

At least that's how Robeson told the story; and though during his life he retold it several ways, the different versions overlap enough that there was probably a kernel of truth (although the real reason the affair ended was more likely that the actress's father, whose nickname was Tiger, had "a strong aversion to people of color"). It would have been just like Paul Robeson to feel closer to the workingman than to the woman in his arms.

Robeson was an earnest Communist. He proved it often enough. When he went to the Soviet Union in the Thirties, he sincerely rejoiced: here, for the first time, he felt that he was regarded as a human being, not a nigger or, for that matter, a celebrity. It was a dream come true, and his intoxication with the idea of socialism maddened his social-climbing wife, Essie, who was the sort of person that craves just enough equality to serve her own turn but wouldn't want to push it much further than that. In later years, when Robeson bullheadedly defied the U.S. officials and politicians who were heaping infamy on him as a fellowtraveler, even his CP mentors tried to persuade him to tone down his glorification of the Worker's Paradise.

Robeson was, at least for a while, a simple and decent man among climbers and manipulators. They used him; some of them even used Communism. It didn't matter: he believed in the idea, regardless of how it might be abused. In 1946 the former All-American explained his loyalty to an investigating committee: "The coach tells you what to do and we do it." It was incidental that the coach was Stalin.

It all started in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1898. Robeson was born to a minister father a former slave who instilled in him an invincible selfrespect-and a warm mother who died when her son was six. (Another son drifted away to Detroit, and apparently became a petty hoodlum before dying on Skid Row.) Robeson inherited his mother's sweetness and his father's dignity, eloquence, muscular build, and canyon-filling voice. At Rutgers he was both a top student and a football star (though at 6'2' and 190 pounds, he seemed bigger than he was).

Marrying Essie, he moved into the Bohemian society of Greenwich Village, where various people recognized him as a vehicle for their ambitions and causes. It helped that everyone really liked him. After failing at law, he made his mark as an actor in everything from Shakespeare and O'Neill to lousy movies. Along the way he discovered his singing talent. But his own passion was civil rights, and as far as he was concerned his talents were worth exploiting only in order to help get black people a fair shake.

Though he was intelligent, he was guileless, and too many people were throwing themselves at him, especially women and Communists. Not that he couldn't be the aggressor; when he played Othello on Broadway with Jose Ferrer and his wife, Uta Hagen, he crudely grabbed Miss Hagen backstage. She succumbed at once; Othello cuckolded lago, The affair cooled one night when lago showed up at the door with his lawyer and a detective. On another occasion Robeson hit Miss Hagen so hard that she lost the child she was carrying (by her husband).

As this summary suggests, Robeson did acquire some guile in the course of his activities. His biographer, Martin Bauml Duberman, refers discreetly to "the needs of Paul's non-monogamous nature." His loyalty to the Coach also led him to maintain complete public silence about the Soviet purges, some of which claimed the lives of friends of his. The sincerity that had driven him at first turned into fanatical obstinacy when he came under attack during the cold war.

And the attacks were ferocious. As Duberman recounts them, they included intense racial abuse. Robeson's career as a performer never fully recovered. Neither did his personal life, though Essie stuck with him until she died in the Sixties.

By then, according to Duberman, Robeson had fallen into depression and tried to kill himself several times. It's speculated that he'd become disillusioned with Communism; but he never said so. What is clear enough is that his world had fallen apart in almost every respect.

Duberman doesn't scant Robeson'sor Stalin's-faults, but he never bothers trying to imagine why the American public was so hostile to Communism; the only anti-Communists he quotes are people like J. Edgar Hoover and Hedda Hopper. Otherwise, he doesn't let his ideas get in the way of his facts, which are meticulously assembled into an engrossing story. The life seems to speak for itself.

Robeson, by the way, was a much better singer than actor. As Othello, he completely failed to convey the Moor's smashed self-esteem at Desdemona's supposed infidelity. Where Olivier displayed shocking, writhing rage beyond all shame or dignity, Robeson could only work up disapproval. Toward Stalin he couldn't even manage that.