Jean Toomer

Toomer, Jean (1894–1967), poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist, and philosopher. Jean Toomer is the author of Cane (1923) and a bridge between two distinct but contemporaneous groups of American writers. The first group consists of authors such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston whose writings define the scope of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance. The second group consists of such writers as Waldo Frank and Gorham Munson who dominated the literary scene of Greenwich Village and whose writings are characterized by experimentalism and political liberalism. Toomer was a comrade-in-letters to Frank and Munson, and a distant but influential figure to Hughes and Hurston, who admired the achievement of Cane (1923), the three-part collection of sketches, poetry, and drama that established a standard for the writers of the New Negro movement and that conveyed the profound search for meaning at the core of American modernism.

The only child of Nina Pinchback and Nathan Toomer, Nathan Pinchback Toomer was born on 29 March 1894 in Washington, D.C. Five years later Nina Pinchback divorced Nathan Toomer and returned to the home of her parents, Nina Hethorn Pinchback and P. B. S. Pinchback, former lieutenant governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction. After Nina Pinchback's death in 1909, the Pinchbacks assumed full responsibility for the rearing of their grandson. Toomer was encouraged in his literary pursuits by his grandmother, to whom Cane is dedicated, and by his uncle Bismarck Pinchback.

Educated in the public but segregated schools of Washington, Toomer graduated from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in 1914. Between 1914 and 1919 he explored a spectrum of intellectual interests and attended such institutions as the University of Wisconsin, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, and New York University. In 1919 Toomer returned to Washington with neither a college degree nor an income. However, in the previous year Toomer had completed “Bona and Paul,” the first of several stories in Cane. Although without firm prospects, Toomer's career as a writer was slowly assuming significance. In 1920 during a sojourn in Greenwich Village where he established friendships with Frank and Munson, Nathan Pinchback Toomer assumed the name of Jean Toomer. In search of a means to solidify his emerging identity as a writer, Toomer adopted the new name shortly after his immersion in the literary life of Greenwich Village and after reading Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe (1904) in whose protagonist Toomer had glimpsed his own potentiality as an artist.

More than a change of names, Toomer's acceptance in the summer of 1921 of a two-month appointment as acting principal at the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Sparta, Georgia, provided him with the experiences that forged a new identity in art. Visiting the South for the first time, Toomer was captivated by the landscape of Georgia, its complex history of slavery and segregation, and the impact of African Americans upon southern culture. Enthralled by the beauty of African American vernacular culture, Toomer also detected its dissolution in the historic migration of African Americans from the South to the North and in the enlarging reach of industrialization.

Returning to Washington, Toomer began writing the masterpiece that he would later spurn but upon which his reputation as a writer remains secure. By December 1921 he had written “Kabnis,” the drama that comprises the third section of Cane. One year later he had completed the experimental work that is a record of his discovery of his southern heritage, an homage to a folk culture that he believed was evanescent, and an exploration of the forces that he believed were the foundation for the spiritual fragmentation of his generation. With the assistance of Frank, who wrote the foreword to the first edition, Toomer's first and most important book was published in the spring of 1923 by Horace Liveright. Although it was praised by reviewers, Cane sold less than five hundred copies, casting a shadow on Toomer's triumphant literary debut.

After Cane, Toomer did not return to the setting that inspired the only book of fiction published during his lifetime. While the search for wholeness remains a central theme in Toomer's large but uneven canon, African American life is never again the subject. The later writings bear the influence of Georgei I. Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic and psychologist whose theories of human development Toomer accepted and promoted as gospel. Beginning in the year of Cane's publication and continuing with few interruptions until his death on 30 March 1967, Toomer's commitment to Gurdjieff's theories had disastrous consequences for his writings. In his unpublished writings, Toomer creates situations that are little more than propaganda for Gurdjieff's theories. In these works one discovers protagonists who bear resemblances to Toomer himself and who function as teachers to characters who possess only a vague awareness of their spiritual potentiality. This regrettable mixture of cant and vanity explains Toomer's growing obscurity after 1923 for publishers foresaw only bankruptcy in such literary ventures. While Toomer continued to write until a few years before his death, he never again produced a work comparable to Cane.

Many African American writers claim Toomer as a literary ancestor. The nuanced portrayal of African American women in Cane is clearly discernible in Alice Walker's Meridian (1976) and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place (1980). Toomer's philosophical treatment of identity and race in both Cane and Essentials (1931), a collection of aphorisms that express his philosophy of life, have influenced the approaches to hybridity in Michael S. Harper's Nightmare Begins Responsibility (1975) and Charles R. Johnson's Oxherding Tale (1982).

Physically white but racially mixed, Toomer did not define himself as an African American but as an American. Toomer's lifelong effort to transcend what he regarded as the narrow divisions of race is fully explored in Essentials (1931) and the epic The Blue Meridian (1936). Toomer's position on race is the principal reason for the absence of racial themes in the writings produced during and after his discovery of Gurdjieff, as well as for his conscious disassociation from Cane: the work that has earned him a central place in the African American literary tradition.

Bibliography

• Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist, 1984.
• Cynthia Earl Ker-man and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer, A Hunger for Wholeness, 1987. Therman B. O'Daniel, ed., Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation, 1988.
• Rudolph P. Byrd, Jean Toomer's Years With Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923–1936, 1990.
• Robert B. Jones, Jean Toomer and the Prison-house of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit, 1993.
• Charles R. Larson, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, 1993. Frederick L. Rusch, ed., A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings, 1993. Robert B. Jones, ed., Jean Toomer: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism, 1923–1993 in Resources for American Literary Study 21 (1995): 68–121. Robert B. Jones, ed., Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism. 1996

Rudolph P. Byrd

For more information on Jean Toomer, visit Britannica.com.

Refusing to be labeled black or white, writer Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was first exalted, then criticized, ignored, and forgotten. However, during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, Toomer was not only rediscovered but also "hailed as one of America's finest African American writers," noted the University of North Carolina's (UNC) website dedicated to English studies. Thus, he became "something he wouldn't have liked" - labeled. Toomer believed that "my racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine," quoted the Southern Literary Journal.

Raised Both Black and White

Born Nathan Eugene Pinchback Toomer on December 26, 1894, in Washington D.C., Toomer, until the age of 18, was perceived by others and lived alternatively as a black and as a white young man. After his father abandoned the family when Toomer was only one year old, he and his mother, Nina, moved in with her father, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, the first United States governor of African American descent.

While living with his grandfather in Washington D.C., Toomer attended an all-black elementary school, but lived in an affluent white neighborhood. However, when his mother remarried and moved her new family to New York, Toomer's life turned 180 degrees. In New York, he entered an all-white high school but lived in an all-black neighborhood. In 1909, after his mother's death, Toomer's life once again turned 180 degrees. He moved back into his grandfather's home in Washington D.C. and graduated from an all-black high school.

Living in both black and white worlds affected Toomer greatly. He saw that the world - both the black world and white world - had labeled him based on his appearance. Being a "fair-skinned, straight-nosed, straight-haired" African American, as UNC online described him, allowed Toomer acceptable entrance into the white world. However, by not looking absolutely "passable" white also allowed him entrance into the black world. This dual-entrance ability "added to his sense of isolation from any group identity," noted Black Issues Book Review. As a result, Toomer, by 1914, began rejecting all attempts to be classified by anyone in any world as "black" or "white." Toomer became the only label he would never refuse, "American."

Prepared to Be a Writer

Throughout the mid-1900s, Toomer continued his education by attending a variety of colleges including the University of Wisconsin and the City College of New York. He also studied many subjects such as agriculture, psychology, and literature. Yet, he never earned a degree. Unbeknownst to even himself, Toomer was not preparing for one career, but for his life as a seeker of knowledge and for his life as a writer.

Toomer began his life as a writer in 1918; for the next few years, he wrote many short stories and poems. Most reflected Toomer's steadfast idea that there was not a black or white race, but a "new race, that I was one of the first conscious members of this race … American," quoted Darwin Turner in The Wayward and the Seeking. However, these short stories and poems were not widely accepted or read by a popular audience. Unaffected, Toomer continued to write but abruptly stopped just two years later.

Adopted New Philosophy

In 1920, Toomer met writer Waldo Frank. Frank believed that a writer's or artist's duty and responsibility was to "[shape] American culture and society," stated Black Issues Book Review. Since Toomer had proclaimed that he was of no race but American, he adopted Frank's philosophy that as an American he should use his writing to "[set] the cultural agenda in a way that legislation or political activism could not."

Shortly after adopting Frank's beliefs, Toomer discovered a new philosophy - the philosophy of idealism. In order to delve into this new philosophy, Toomer stopped writing. Seeking knowledge, he began to study idealism which led him to believe that "in life nothing is only physical. There is also the symbolical. White and Black … In general, the great contrasts. The pair of opposites," further quoted Turner in The Wayward and the Seeking. Toomer's role in this philosophy was not so much that of a writer, but as a "reconciler" between the great contrasts of black and white.

To further his role as a "reconciler," Toomer sought out other writers who believed in and who demonstrated this idealistic philosophy in their work. He found the Imagist poetics or Symbolists: Charles Baudelaire and Walt Whitman. These writers, with "their insistence on fresh vision and on the perfect clean economical line was just what I had been looking for," commented Toomer in The Wayward and the Seeking. Yet, it was not only these writers or this new philosophy which would result in Toomer's most praised and most criticized novel. It was another geographical move - this time to the South.

Published a Literary Masterpiece

In 1921, Toomer began working and living in Sparta, Georgia. During this time in American history, the segregation of the races could be most blatantly seen in the rural South. No longer could Toomer remain focused on being only a "reconciler," a seeker of knowledge, or believe in one race, American. In the South, race could not be ignored. This indisputable fact forced Toomer to confront his own personal views on what others had labeled him - both black and white. How he did so was by writing Cane.

Like Toomer's own three-part identity - black, white, American - the structure of Cane is segregated into three sections. The first focuses on African American life in the South. By detailing the lives of six African American women, Toomer, in this section creates "the idealization of rural African Americans" noted the Southern Literary Journal. In section two, Toomer presents the opposite identity from section one - the urban North. He portrays this urban North as "a place of shallow, materialistic and antimystical striving," further noted the Southern Literary Journal. The third section once again shifts identities this time back to the rural South. However, Toomer focuses on an artist plagued by what role he should play in the world - should he represent the African American race or strive to become unidentified with any race.

Hailed by many critics of the time as a literary masterpiece, Cane nevertheless faded into obscurity. However, the ending of the book has provided clues as to why Toomer never again specifically focused on the black and white races as separate identities and how these identities can be harmoniously blended. Cane ends with the plagued artist watching a sunrise. As the sun rises, he theorizes that a bridge between races is not possible, yet a "bridge between himself and the universe" is, noted the Southern Literary Journal. Toomer's subsequent writings emphasized this philosophy.

Challenged Others to Think

Over the next 27 years, Toomer, unlike Cane, did not fade into obscurity. He married twice, became a father, and continued to challenge himself and others to think about their perception of the world. His belief that there is no black or white race, only American, never wavered; yet, how people should discover this belief changed with each new philosophy Toomer studied. For example, in 1938, Toomer traveled to India where he began writing about spiritual enlightenment. However, he struggled with India's "a life of withdrawal from the world," noted biographers Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge in The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness.

During the 1940s, Toomer continued to struggle to connect his understanding of idealism to another religion: Quakerism. He tried to work through this struggle by organizing a living space called the Mill House. The Mill House welcomed both Quakers and laymen and offered an opportunity for both to dismiss all separations of religions and cultures. One member of Mill House praised Toomer for the "opened doors we were ready to walk through," quoted BANC!. Toomer wrote many essays and lectured frequently about Mill House; however, unlike Cane, they were not widely read. By 1950, Toomer stopped writing altogether, slowly withdrew from public life, and on March 30, 1967, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, he died.

Rediscovered Masterpiece and Writer

Why Toomer remained forgotten until the Harlem Renaissance has been widely debated. One popular theory is that Toomer was "frustrated by his inability to market much of his work," noted African American Review. Therefore, because of the time in which Toomer had been writing, he had been labeled a black writer. And, the white society had been taught not to read a novel, an essay, a poem, or other others works by a writer identified as "black."

The Southern Literary Journal has offered another popular theory as to why Toomer was forgotten. Toomer created his own obscurity by showing two faces - the "good" Toomer and the "bad" Toomer. The good Toomer "briefly and tactfully uses race to contain literary ambiguity [in Cane ], but the bad Toomer jettisons both race and literary ambiguity." In other words, Toomer was seen as a race traitor because he "challenged his culture's demand for absolute distinctions between white and black," noted African American Review. Consequently, because Toomer maintained his belief that he was no race but American, he pushed himself into obscurity.

However, this view changed during the 1960s and 1970s. Toomer was no longer seen as "bad" or a "race traitor." During this time of the Harlem Renaissance, "Toomer's rejection of race sounded, more importantly, like a rejection of white cultural hegemony," stated Black Issues Book Review. Therefore, Toomer became a cultural African American icon who, like civil rights activist Malcolm X, promoted the African American race as a separate identity.

Yet, by the 1990s, another theory would once again reemphasize that Toomer was not rejecting the white race or the black race. He accepted and truly believed that there is only one race, American. Integrating Roland Bartres classic 1956 essay Myth Today, Charles Harmon in the Southern Literary Journal offered his own interpretation of Cane using the philosophy of "neither/norism."

This philosophy, Bartres defined as "stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both," Harmon quoted. Thus, Toomer, in Cane, which had presented both the black viewpoint and white viewpoint while ultimately rejecting both, had done just what Bartres defined. Therefore, Toomer should not be seen as "good" or "bad," rejecting the white hegemony, or as a race traitor - or in effect, a two-faced writer. What Toomer should be seen as is a writer who courageously challenged a belief by writing a masterpiece.

Ultimately, Toomer has been remembered as a significant writer - a significant African American writer. Although still labeled, Toomer's own words live on to reject that label. As quoted by the African American Review, Toomer never worried about how others saw him. He had always "simply gone and lived here and there. I have been what I am." And, as he further commented on racial identity, he urged people to realize that "both white and colored people share the same stupidity." However, it is Toomer's message to writers and artists that may truly silence his critics and his labelers: "Art … embraces all life … [its] noblest function … is to expand, elevate, and enrich that life."

Books

Kerman, Cynthia and Richard Elrigde, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness, 1987.

Turner, Darwin, editor, The Wayward and the Seeking, 1980.

Periodicals

African American Review, Fall 1998.

BANC! 2, 1972.

Black Issues Book Review, January/February 2001.

Southern Literary Journal, Spring 2000.

Online

Jean Toomer (1894-1967), University of North Carolina online, http://www.inc.edu/courses/eng81br1/toomer/html (February 28, 2003).

poet; writer

Personal Information

Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, December 26, 1894, in Washington, DC; died March 30, 1967, in Doylestown, PA; son of Nathan and Nina (Pinchback) Toomer; married Margery Latimer (a writer), October 30, 1931 (died August 16, 1932); married Marjorie Content, September 1, 1934; children: Margery (with Latimer).
Education: Attended University of Wisconsin, 1914; American College of Physical Education, Chicago, 1916; University of Chicago, 1916; City College of New York and New York University, 1917.

Career

Moved between New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, 1915-21, working as a car salesman, an assistant librarian at City College of New York, and a physical education director at a settlement home; began writing occasionally during college years; temporary head of the all-black Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia, 1921; wrote series of sketches, which later became Cane, 1922; began involvement with Gurdjieff Institute, 1923; continued writing, but rarely published after 1930; suffered malicious media attack over marriage to first wife, 1932; settled in Doylestown, PA, with second wife, 1936; traveled to India, 1939. Showed interest in a variety of philosophies and teachings, including psychoanalysis, Quakerism, and dianetics.

Life's Work

Jean Toomer, a writer of mixed racial heritage, was a complex and often misunderstood figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Although he frequently evaded the question of his racial identity, his initial fame in literary circles--for the 1923 novel Cane-- was based largely on his reputation as an African American author who held great promise for changing the way white America viewed black artists.

Toomer's grandfather, Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, was the son of a white plantation owner and Eliza Stewart, a former slave of mixed race, possibly including African and Native American blood. Pinchback didn't hesitate to identify himself as black and, in fact, made that identity very much a part of his career: by the 1860s, Pinchback had a broad public reputation as a black politician, including a brief career as the first black governor in the United States. Toomer's mother, Nina, was Pinchback's only daughter; his father, Nathan, was variously reported as English, Dutch, Spanish, African, and Native American. Toomer's biographers, Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, recorded Nathan and Nina's marriage license as listing both parents as "colored."

Jean, legally named Nathan Pinchback Toomer, was born December 26, 1894, in Washington D.C., where Pinchback had moved his family in 1892. Nathan Toomer vanished as soon as financial problems set in, and Nina and her baby boy moved back into her father's home. For much of his early childhood, Jean was an adventurous and assertive child, ruling the neighborhood gang with confidence. He attended the Garnet School, an elementary school for black students, where "he threw crayons and erasers around, rolled inkwells up the aisles, sent notes, and teased the girls," according to Kerman and Eldridge in The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness. Straddling both the black and white worlds, Toomer was separated from his neighborhood crowd when he was at school, since the other families on his street in the nation's capital were generally of white immigrant stock.

In 1905--during a period he later described in one of his autobiographical pieces as a "dark night streaked with nightmares"--Toomer experienced a year of illnesses that put him behind in school and toppled him from the leadership position among his neighborhood buddies. As he withdrew and became a solitary child, his enthusiasm for reading and study was nurtured by his Uncle Bismarck, a studious member of the Pinchback's extended family. Toomer later recalled this time as a significant turning point in his life: "I had been active mainly externally. Now I could not be so. I gradually became active mainly internally and built up an inner world of my own in which intangible things were more real than tangibles."

When Toomer's mother moved to New York and remarried in 1906, young Jean had a brief opportunity to rebound. In a white school in New Rochelle, he succeeded with his studies and built his physical strength back up. But in 1909 Nina died from advanced appendicitis, and Jean went back to his grandparents. They had moved to a different part of Washington, and he discovered there his first opportunity to live in a black neighborhood. Toomer described in an autobiographical work his enthusiasm for "this world--an aristocracy--such as never existed before and perhaps never will exist again in America--midway between the white and Negro worlds. For the first time I lived in a colored world."

Enrolled in Dunbar High School in 1910, Toomer found himself enthusiastic about a variety of subjects, sports, and his social group. He and his best friend, Henry Kennedy, "cut school to read books and took long walks reading Shakespeare and Milton aloud"; Kerman and Eldridge surmised that "Jean had a growing sense of himself as different from the other students."

When he graduated from high school in 1914, college applications required that Toomer classify his race; he chose to identify himself as white or not to identify himself at all. He apparently feared the discrimination he might experience if he enrolled in any predominantly white college as a "colored" student. Entering the agriculture program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he found himself again enthusiastic about an active social life and sports, which he indulged in much more than his studies. He quit Wisconsin after a semester, briefly entertained the possibility of enrolling in a similar program at the University of Massachusetts in the fall of 1915, but instead took some time out in New York City.

In January of 1916 he started studies at the American College of Physical Education in Chicago; soon after, he also enrolled in the University of Chicago. He enjoyed the course of study, but again found his greatest excitement and education outside of any formal training. As Kerman and Eldridge noted, "Jean's intellectual horizons were expanding to the point of explosion." He began attending lectures on--among other topics--socialism, naturalism, and atheism, and eventually gave several talks of his own.

Toomer eventually put aside work at both colleges, choosing instead to drift through a variety of less orthodox learning experiences. He moved between New York City, Chicago, and Washington D.C. In New York and Chicago he proved himself in various jobs, including stints as a car salesman and an assistant librarian at City College of New York. In D.C., he tended to live off of his grandparents, which he could do for only so long before his grandfather's obvious disappointment made him anxious and restless. Throughout it all, he was reading voraciously, developing a broad intellectual background, and even beginning to write his own pieces.

His belief in himself as an author blossomed in 1920, when he met one of his most important friends and his first mentor, author Waldo Frank, at a literary party in New York. With Frank's encouragement, Toomer devoted himself to his writing, returning to his grandparents' apartment in Washington, D.C. to work. He very quickly produced reams of manuscripts, none of which, however, he wanted to submit for publication. He claimed in one of his autobiographical pieces: "Before I had even so much as glimpsed the possibility of writing Cane, I had a trunk full of manuscripts. The phrase 'trunk full' is often used loosely. I mean it literally and exactly."

Just when he was beginning to feel too exhausted to keep working, he was offered an opportunity for a change: he took a temporary position as the substitute head at the all-black Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia. He remained through the fall of 1921, seeing for the first time in his life the world of rural African Americans; it was this discovery, ultimately, that inspired Toomer to write the sketches that would eventually become Cane, one of the landmark experimental texts of early twentieth-century American literature. In a letter to Frank, quoted in Brian Joseph Benson and Mabel Mayle Dillard's Jean Toomer, he wrote: "The visit to Georgia last fall was the starting point of almost everything of worth that I have done. I heard folk-songs come from the lips of Negro peasants. I saw the rich dusk beauty that I heard many false accounts about, and of which, till then, I was somewhat skeptical. And a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly into life and responded to them."

In July of 1922, Toomer collected the sketches into a book; Cane, which takes its name from the harvesting of sugar cane in the southern states, was accepted for publication by Horace Liveright on January 2, 1923, and appeared in bookstores the following September. An intriguing blend of poetry, short stories, and drama, Cane contrasts the black experience in the rural South with that of the urban North and offers powerful insights into the nature of human frustration, alienation, and spiritual disconnection. The book did not actually sell well--no more than 1,000 copies--but it became, nonetheless, a highly acclaimed modern novel.

Not surprisingly, the book and its author were received as part of the then astronomical rise in black American intellectual and artistic output known since as the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer's talent was applauded by leaders of the black community, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Countee Cullen; Kerman and Eldridge pointed out that "Du Bois, Locke, and others were urging him to make an even more fruitful 'race contribution.'" Nathan Irvin Huggins, who wrote the first comprehensive study of the Harlem Renaissance in 1971, described Cane as "more than other contemporary novels by black authors ... a conscious exploration of Negro identity."

Many of the Cane fragments, as well as other poems and short stories by Toomer, soon appeared in literary reviews, including Dial, Liberator, Broom, and the Little Review. The first of these contributions appeared in April of 1922, when the Crisis, the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), published "Song of the Son," which would later appear in Cane. In response to both Cane and his shorter works, many editors insisted on identifying the author as black or, to use the terminology of the time, Negro; Toomer soon began expressing his discomfort with this.

Toomer's rejection of race classification is thought to have stemmed largely from his commitment to art and to his idea of a "new American" race. These feelings prevail in a 1923 letter to his publishers from which Kerman and Eldridge quote: "I have told you ... to make use of whatever racial factors you wish. Feature Negro if you wish, but do not expect me to feature it in advertisement for you.... Whatever statement I give will inevitably come from a sympathetic human and art point of view; not from a racial one."

It was only after he married Margery Latimer, a white novelist from a wealthy midwestern family, on October 30, 1931, that Toomer confronted the kind of bigotry that white America could visit on a person of color. The Toomers had settled quietly in Carmel, California, when Toomer granted an interview to a San Francisco reporter who he assumed was interested in his philosophical work; when the article appeared, however, he discovered that the paper considered his race much more important--and not in the way that the New York literati had. The story began appearing in syndicated articles around the country with headlines such as "Negro Who Wed White Writer Sees New Race"--despite the fact that Toomer had listed himself on his marriage license as white.

Toomer's own relationship to an African American identity, apart from his political feelings about the black population in general, is described in a seven-page pamphlet called "A Fiction and Some Facts." Although the original manuscript is undated, Kerman and Eldridge guess its origin at around 1937; Benson and Dillard, however, assume that it was written in 1932, soon after the publicity began concerning his marriage.

The author asserted in the pamphlet that his grandfather "came of stock predominantly Scotch, Welsh and German," adding, "I am not prepared to state as a fact that there was, or that there was not, some Negro or Indian blood in the family." He suggested that his grandfather's predominant identity as black was, more than anything else, political opportunism: "Whereas others would have thought it to their disadvantage to claim Negro blood, Pinchback thought it to his advantage." Toomer is often quoted as having said: "I am I, for better or worse. If Negro blood is among the bloods that make me what I am, then the Negro blood, along with others, shares in producing whatever virtues I may have, and also shares in producing whatever vices I may have." Later, he insisted, "In biological fact I am, as are all Americans, a member of a new people that is forming in this country. If we call this people the Americans, then biologically and racially I am an American."

Nearly a decade prior to his first marriage, around the time of Cane 's publication in 1923, Toomer's search for intellectual and emotional wholeness led him to the works and method of George Gurdjieff, a Russian philosopher living in France who had articulated a "way" to spiritual realization that had, by the late 1920s, won a sizable following in New York. A disciple's involvement consisted of classes, many of which included reading, attendance at lectures, and physical exercises that appealed to Toomer's earlier work in physical education. A number of "teachers" led the classes in New York; Kerman and Eldridge described their work: "Each in his own way was teaching Gurdjieff's complex cosmological system through an experiential process by which people could work on themselves to attain more awareness of that system, true individuality, the development of a higher consciousness." Toomer subsequently withdrew almost completely from the literary circles in New York.

Soon after immersing himself in the system, Toomer envisioned himself as a teacher, a role that had appealed to him since his childhood as leader of his neighborhood gang. He traveled to Gurdjieff's Institute for Man's Harmonious Development in France (where the guru himself taught), first in the summer of 1924 and again in 1926, 1927, and 1929. During this time, Toomer also started several groups in the United States. He had the most success with a branch in the Midwest--Gurdjieff felt that his word needed to travel beyond New York--where he started a Chicago group in 1926.

The Chicago group survived through 1931, the same year that Toomer married for the first time. Margery Latimer Toomer died less than a year after their wedding, on August 16, 1932, after the birth of their child. Toomer never really tried to revive the Chicago group after this blow. He eventually returned to New York, where he met Marjorie Content in 1934; they were married on September 1 in Mexico. The couple settled on a farm, which they christened Mill House, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in 1936. By this time, Toomer had broken with Gurdjieff, who kept requiring money for support from his disciples. Toomer himself earned little money, aside from an occasional fee for his lectures and infrequent publications. He avoided taking on any kind of regular work, instead devoting himself to his writing, which had again become prolific.

By 1927 Toomer was writing quite steadily again, producing essays, fiction, and poetry, as well as longer manuscripts, but even his fiction at that time was largely determined by his spiritual work with Gurdjieff. He consistently submitted the work to publishers, both book publishers and small journals, but only a fraction of what he was writing would make it into print. Toomer was aware that this kind of work was not what his publishers expected of him; they were anticipating a follow-up to Cane. But the increasingly abstract nature of his writings limited his potential audience. The last piece of work Toomer had published by a major publication during his lifetime was in 1936, when The New American Caravan printed "Blue Meridian," a long poem that focuses on the concept of identity and offers a vision of a single, harmonious human race.

Toomer and his second wife set up a Mill House imprint, a small, private publishing operation that allowed him to distribute some of his work in pamphlet form. He continued to lecture as well, but neither of these efforts brought his family a viable income; they tended to live, instead, off of gifts from her wealthy father. Jean still felt that it was his primary purpose in life to find the "way" and to realize his "being-consciousness." After his break with Gurdjieff, he pursued spiritual work in his own writing and tried a few other systems. In 1939 he, along with his reluctant wife and daughter, traveled through India looking for a teacher who could reveal a "true" system of self-realization; he returned, unsuccessful, after five months. In the 1940s he believed that he had found his answer in a small Quaker church in their area, where he and Marjorie became involved with the Friends until 1948. He flirted briefly with Jungian psychoanalysis in 1949 and gave dianetics a try in 1951. Finally, he returned to the Gurdjieff method, which maintained him through the rest of his life.

In the late 1940s Toomer began experiencing physical ailments, particularly digestive difficulty and abdominal pains. He tried to address the problem through diet and psychoanalysis, but throughout the 1950s the complications simply worsened; other physical problems gradually attacked him as well. He was so incapacitated by 1957 that he had to relinquish all involvement in group meetings, including his own lecturing and teaching. After moving into a nursing home in 1965, he died two years later on March 30. Toomer never saw the revitalization of Cane, which began with its republication in 1969; the book won the kind of sales and broad public recognition that would have made his life much easier. Benson and Dillard have described the reputation of the novel during Toomer's lifetime as "one of those classics kept alive by word of mouth and sheer admiration on the part of readership." By 1980, however, with the release of several paperback editions, Cane was reaching a "much larger audience, [was proving to be] a financially successful venture, and [was] once again ... beginning to exert a wide influence on readers."

Works

Writings

• Cane (a novel comprised of poetry, short stories, and drama), Boni and Liveright, 1923.
• The Gallonwerps (unpublished), 1927.
• Transatlantic (unpublished), 1929.
• Essentials, Lakeside Press, 1931.
• Caromb (unpublished), 1932.

• "Easter," Little Review, Spring 1925.
• "Mr. Costyve Duditch," Dial, December 1928.
• "Winter on Earth," The Second American Caravan, edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Macauley Company, 1928.
• "York Beach," The New American Caravan, edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Macauley Company, 1929.
• "Withered Skin of Berries," written in 1930, first published in The Wayward and the Seeking, 1982.

• "Song of the Son," Crisis, April 1922.
• "Bride of Air" (unpublished), 1931.
• "Brown River Smile," Pagany, January-March 1932.
• "As the Eagle Soars," Crisis, April 1932.
• "Blue Meridian," The New American Caravan, edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Norton, 1936.

• "Oxen Cart and Warfare," Little Review, Autumn-Winter 1924-25.
• "Reflections," Dial, April 1929.
• "Race Problems and Modern Society," Man and His World, edited by Baker Brownell, D. Van Nostrand, 1929.
• "A Fiction and Some Facts," c. 1930s.

• Balo, in Plays of Negro Life, edited by Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory, Harper's, 1927.

• Autobiographical manuscripts are extensive and largely unpublished, except for the excerpts included in The Wayward and the Seeking, which also includes some previously unpublished stories and poems.
• "Values and Fictions: A Psychological Record," 1925.
• "Earth Being," 1930.
• "Autobiography," 1936.
• "Incredible Journey," 1945.
• "Outline of an Autobiography," 1946.

Further Reading

Books

• Benson, Brian Joseph, and Mabel Mayle Dillard, Jean Toomer, Twayne, 1980.
• Black Literary Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Bone, Robert, The Negro Novel in America, revised edition, Yale University Press, 1965, pp. 65-94.
• Bontemps, Arna, editor, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, Dodd, Mead, 1972, pp. 51-62.
• Huggins, Nathan Irvin, Harlem Renaissance, Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Kerman, Cynthia Earl, and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness, Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
• Kramer, Victor A., editor, The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, AMS Press, 1987.
• McKay, Nellie Y., Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936, University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
• O'Daniel, Therman B., editor, Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation, Howard University Press, 1988.
• Turner, Darwin T., editor, The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, Howard University Press, 1982.

• Black American Literature Forum, Fall 1987, pp. 253-73.
• Crisis, February 1924, pp. 161-63; September 1924, pp. 204-10.
• Southern Review, July 1985, pp. 682-94.

— Ondine E. Le Blanc

Quotes:

"Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity."

Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894–March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Archive 3 Works 4 References 5 See also 6 External links

Biography

Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., mixed racial and ethnic descent (Dutch, French, Native American, African-American, Welsh, German, Jewish). His parents were Nathan Toomer and Nina Pinchback. His maternal grandfather was Louisiana Governor P. B. S. Pinchback, the first African American to become Governor of a U.S. state. He spent his childhood attending both all-white and all-black segregated schools. In his early years, Toomer resisted racial classifications and wished to be identified only as an American after going to an all-black school in Washington D.C., then an all-white school in New Rochelle N.Y., then an all-black school in Washington D.C. again. Toomer attended six institutions of higher education between 1914 and 1917 (the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, New York University, and the City College of New York) studying agriculture, fitness, biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree. The readings that he would undertake and the lectures he attended during his college years shaped the direction his writing would take. After leaving college, Toomer published some short stories, devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and took a job as a principal in Sparta, Georgia. The segregation Toomer experienced in the South led him to identify more strongly as an African American.

In 1923, Toomer published the novel Cane, an important work of High Modernism. It is considered by many scholars to be his best work. A series of poems and short stories about the black experience in America, Cane was hailed by critics and is seen as an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation.

His 1936 Whitmanesque long poem The Blue Meridian dramatically foreshadows the racial discourse of the 21st Century and the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Toomer found it harder and harder to get published throughout the 1930s and in 1940 moved with his second wife to Doylestown, Pennsylvania where he joined the Religious Society of Friends and began to withdraw from society. Toomer wrote a small amount of fiction and published essays in Quaker publications during this time, but devoted most of his time to serving on Quaker committees. Toomer stopped writing literary works after 1950. He died in 1967 after several years of poor health.

A close and longtime friend of American painter Georgia O'Keeffe, Toomer appears as a character in the 2009 television movie Georgia O'Keeffe. However, in this regard he has no dialogue. He speaks only in about a half dozen outtakes available exclusively on the Lifetime Television website. Toomer not only helped O'Keeffe recover from a crucial nervous breakdown but was important in giving her the courage to live independently and develop her best work. So his excision is significant. Additionally, the lead characters played by Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen are made to look quite close to their historical counterparts. Henry Simmons, cast in the Toomer role, looks nothing like Jean Toomer. Vernal Bagneris, who plays Toomer in the 1991 Public Television version, A Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz offers a much more credible representation.

Archive

Jean Toomer's papers are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

Works

• Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923) ISBN 0871401517
  • Written during the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a collection of poems and short narratives that examine the African-American condition both in the South as well as in Harvard, D.C. around the time of its publication.
• Blood Burning Moon (1923)
• Problems of Civilization, by Ellsworth Huntington, Whiting Williams, Jean Toomer and others, (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1929)
• Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1931)
• An Interpretation of Friends Worship (Philadelphia: Committee on Religious Education of Friends General Conference, 1947)
• The Flavor of Man (Philadelphia: Young Friends Movement of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1949)
• The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) ISBN 0807842095

References

• Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, editors Michael Feith and Genevieve Fabre. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. ISBN 0813528461
• Turner, Darwin T. "Introduction." Cane by Jean Toomer (New York: Liveright, 1993). ix-xxv. ISBN 0-87140-151-7.

See also

Literature portal

• Cane (novel)#Journal articles (for a list of recent critical studies on Toomer's Cane)
• List of African American writers

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean Toomer

• Modern American Poetry: Jean Toomer
• Essay on Cane
• Online Toomer bio
• Essay on Toomer and Class
• Biography of Toomer and his works

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)