Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism.

Robert B. Jones, ed. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1996. 160 pp. $25.00.

Reviewed by

Kathleen Pfeiffer Oakland University 

Jean Toomer has long been an enigmatic figure in both American literature and African American culture. The breathtaking lyricism of Cane (1923) demonstrates his gift for literary expression, yet many critics believe that he never realized the artistic potential so evident in that collection of stories, poems, and sketches. Toomer did see several essays and poems appear in print, but he died in obscurity, frustrated by his inability to market much of his work. Many scholars argue that he failed because he rejected his African American heritage after Cane appeared, and cite his two marriages to white women as evidence. Yet while it is true that, as a published author, Jean Toomer qualifies as a literary "one-hit wonder," as a writer, he was dedicated and prolific, to say the least. Anyone who has browsed the catalogue of his papers at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library knows that Toomer's literary output was voluminous and wide-ranging, sometimes cryptic and uneven, and often stylistically innovative and intellectually experimental. Darwin T. Turner's important volume The Wayward and the Seeking (1980), which includes selections from Toomer's several autobiographies and his fiction, prose, and drama, first drew attention to these writings, thereby enriching our understanding of the complex writer; the late Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer co-edited the valuable Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988); and more recently, Frederick L. Rusch's A Jean Toomer Reader (1993) presents some of Toomer's letters and his previously unpublished material. Now, we have still greater access to his writings: Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism, edited by the late Robert B. Jones. This slim, dense volume not only attests to Toomer's heretofore underappreciated critical aptitude; it also challenges the simplistic myth of his racial self-hatred by demonstrating the complexity of his views on race and literature.

Jean Toomer did not suddenly abandon African American culture after writing Cane; he had long been active in both the black and the white worlds. Jones's introduction stresses this fact and positions Toomer on the bridge connecting Lost Generation and Negro Renaissance. "To my mind," he writes, "Toomer's significance must ultimately be evaluated in light of his contributions to both African American and American literature." Jones details Toomer's ongoing literary relationships with "an informal brotherhood of writers, intellectuals, and critics" who "all shared in a disregard for postwar materialism, industrialism, and commercialism." The volume's preface by George Hutchinson complements the introductory essay (which Jones, because of his untimely death, was unable to revise), arguing that Toomer was a figure who resisted easy categorization; Hutchinson, too, underscores the significance of Toomer's "close and complex" relationships with many writers and intellectuals of the period, white and black, Lost Generation and Negro Renaissance.

Three sections comprise the collection: essays of literary criticism and reviews, cultural and sociological criticism, and essays on Quaker religious philosophy. Ten of these pieces appear in print for the first time. The majority of the previously published essays appeared in small journals which proliferated in the early part of the century, and which reflect, as Hutchinson rightly notes, Toomer's position "in a different sector of the American literary field than that to which he has usually been assigned." The collection thus demonstrates his connections to literary magazines like Dial, Broom, and S4N, and to men like Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, and Kenneth Burke, to name but a few.

Jean Toomer's views on race were rich and idiosyncratic, and his intellectual singularity is evident in the selections of cultural and sociological criticism. Several of the reviews are stylistically difficult, particularly when Toomer employs passive constructions and sweeping declarations. His review of Zona Gale's Faint Perfume, for instance, opens, "A mild and somewhat passive sensitivity in contact with life's innocuous commonplaces yields two primary states: a poignance, and an awareness proportioned to the degree of sensitivity." But such a turgid style does not dominate the section. His 1921 review of Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry" demonstrates not only Toomer's thoughtful critique of Imagism, but also his early desire to clarify the distinction between artists and moralists. "Art," Toomer writes, "embraces all life . . . . [its] noblest function . . . is to expand, elevate, and enrich that life." He expresses similar passion about literature in the 1923 "Open Letter to Gorham Munson," in which he yearns for a poetry of substance, of power. "Whatever its design, what significance is there to a machine rusting in a junkman's yard? What to a poem, sketch or novel that lacks stuff, power, deep organic functioning? That can do no work?" This desire for a synthesis of design and substance reflects his ongoing concern for the aesthetic implications of encroaching industrialism.

The literary criticism articulates Toomer's philosophy of writing, which was always attentive to psychology and spirituality. In "The Psychology and Craft of Writing," Toomer identifies literature as an "art-product," and he aims, as a writer, to "essentialize" and to "spiritualize" experience. "The act of writing involves thought, feeling, and sensation," he notes, "and, though a special function, it is intimately connected with the other functions of the human psyche." The essay not only echoes Toomer's early passion about art and demonstrates his ongoing commitment to his craft, but it prophetically forecasts both the nature and the language of contemporary debates about race.

Jean Toomer maintained an ambivalent and nuanced position about his mixed racial identity, and his cultural and sociological criticism consistently questions the racial discourse of the United States. He was considered a race traitor precisely because he so challenged his culture's demand for absolute distinctions between white and black. Indeed, we see Toomer's individuality in "Race Problems and Modern Society," in which he declares that "the dominant white is just as much a victim of his form as is the Negro of his." He argues that "both white and colored people share the same stupidity," for both intensify "the very attitudes which entrapped them." To his mind "positive possibilities" come from Americans of mixed races, hybrids like himself, who are "truly synthetic and human." Thus, rather than evincing racial self-hatred, these writings bespeak an inclusive racial identity which embraces the diversity of his heritage.

In "The Crock of Problems," Toomer considers the relationship between "passing"and race loyalty; in the process, he anticipates the very critiques of passing which underscore many analyses of his life. He acknowledges the racial self-hatred which may emerge "as a sort of defense mechanism" within someone who is light enough to pass; he concedes that the disparity between one's outer, white-skinned life of apparent progress and one's inner life "is likely to be anything but pleasant." But he emphatically denies the relevance of passing in his own life. "I have not had the psychological state which obtains when one 'passes' or tries to pass," he asserts, "because I have never had to try. I have simply gone and lived here and there. I have been what I am." Toomer acknowledges the personal implications of his argument, for he cites his grandfather, the influential Reconstruction politician P. B. S. Pinchback, on the first page. But here, too, he rejects an exclusive racial affiliation with his forebear, arguing ultimately, "none of the standard color labels fit me."

These essays also reveal Toomer's wide range: They reflect his familiarity with Marx and Freud; they hint at the radicalism of his response to cultural turmoil; and they articulate his lifelong concern for the future of humanity ("millenarianism," according to Jones). Yet still we see the eye of an artist, in "The Hill," for instance, a portrait of Alfred Steiglitz and his Lake George home: "I wonder what the old house felt when rooms and baths were added," Toomer writes, "when furnishings which it had never seen the like of were moved in, when the complexities of the Steiglitz family began weaving in and out of the rooms and into the simple old wood and farmer's plaster." Toomer achieved lyric resonance well after Cane.

Toomer's thinking and writing in the years following Cane were strongly influenced by the mystic philosophy of Georges I. Gurdjieff, at whose Institute for Man's Harmonious Development he began studying in 1924; he later embraced Quakerism. The collection's third section reflects these involvements, and his religious writings continue to articulate his skepticism about the future of humanity. In "The Message of Quakerism" this is most clear: "There is a race going on. Between education and catastrophe. Education, slow. Catastrophe, rapid." Through religion, Toomer finds a "third way - transformation - sudden mutation - that is, new birth." This transformative "third way" offers a spiritual paradigm strongly connected to his earlier writings about race. Toomer's religious writings thus reiterate his lifelong quest for genuine synthesis.

These essays a]re complex and provocative: Toomer's literary criticism aligns him with many central figures in American intellectual history; his critique of segregation logic offers a holistic, multiracial paradigm for national identity; and his religious and spiritual writings attend to the moral responsibility of each individual. This collection offers fresh insight into Jean Toomer's protean mind, and it ought to compel scholars to expand and diversify our critical approaches to the writing and the life of this iconoclastic intellect.