Cane Read online

  While Cane was clearly an artistic success, sales were disappointing. It sold only one thousand copies, but it was printed in a second edition. As Toomer himself remarked: “The reviews were splendid. It didn’t sell well, but it made its literary mark—that was all I asked.”138 The strength of the reviews was doubtless a factor in Liveright’s decision to reissue the second, smaller edition in 1927. While scholars would continue to praise Cane, it would remain out of print until the appearance of the third edition in 1967, followed by editions in 1969 and 1975. Doubtless, the renewed interest in the Harlem Renaissance by the writers of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, the institutionalization of the field of African American Studies in 1969, and the dramatic growth of African American literary studies through the 1980s led to the first Norton Critical Edition in 1988, splendidly edited by Darwin T. Turner.

  Though Cane had “made its literary mark,” Toomer’s relationship to the book he so much desired to be published began to shift as early as the fall of 1923. This shift, which would eventually result in his rejection of the book he once regarded as the “passport” that “would lead [him] from the cramped conditions of Washington which [he] had outgrown, into the world of writers and literature,” would be catalyzed by his friend Waldo Frank and his publisher, George Liveright,139 involving the launch of Cane itself and the efforts by Liveright to promote it. Frank had written, by all accounts, a beautiful foreword to Cane. He lavished praise upon his friend and protégé’s debut book: “A poet has arisen among our American youth who has known how to turn the essences and materials of his Southland into the essences and materials of literature.” 140 Quite perceptively, the ever-supportive Frank described Cane as “an aesthetic equivalent of the land.” So far, so good.

  However, the language that disturbed Toomer, was this: “A poet has arisen in that land who writes, not as a Southerner, not as a rebel against Southerners, not as a Negro, not apologist or priest or critic: who writes as a poet.” 141 Moreover Frank’s references to Toomer as “the gifted Negro” and “an American Negro” inadvertently only made matters worse so far as Toomer was concerned, undermining his desire to position himself publicly as a writer “neither white nor black.” Frank’s straightforward description of Toomer as a Negro, notwithstanding Toomer’s belabored efforts to explain his racial sense of himself to his friend privately, felt first like disappointment, and then betrayal: “One day in the mail his [Frank’s] preface [sic] to my book came. I read it and had as many mixed feelings as I have ever had. On the one hand, it was a tribute and a send-of as only Waldo Frank could have written it, and my gratitude for his having gotten the book accepted rose to the surface and increased my gratitude for the present piece of work in so far as it affirmed me as a literary artist of great promise. On the other hand, in so far as the racial thing went, it was evasive, or, in any case, indefinite.” 142

  For reasons that are not clear to us, Toomer obsessed and fretted about Frank’s references to his race in the foreword, as if Frank had either invented his black ancestry or publicly unmasked him as a Negro writer, leading him inevitably to question Frank’s motives: “Well, I asked myself, why should the reader know? Why should any such thing be incorporated in a foreword to this book? Why should Waldo Frank or any other be my spokesman in this matter? All of this was true enough, and I was more or less reconciled to let the preface [sic] stand as it was, inasmuch as it was so splendid that I could not take issue with it on this, after all, minor point, inasmuch as my need to have the book published was so great, but my suspicions as to Waldo Frank’s lack of understanding of, or failure to accept, my actuality became active again.”143Toomer would also claim that he learned from mutual friends that it was Frank who had constructed a portrait of him as a Negro in the literary circles of New York, a portrait that, he felt, misrepresented the “actuality” of his race, or his racelessness. Toomer, no doubt unfairly given his extensive contacts with other black writers in Washington and New York and his grandfather’s historical status as the highest ranking black elected official in the whole of Reconstruction, claimed to believe that it was “through Frank’s agency that an erroneous picture of me was put in the minds of certain people in New York before my book came out. Thus was started a misunderstanding in the very world, namely the literary art world, in which I expected to be really understood. I knew none of this at the time….”144 While Kerman and Eldridge write that Toomer and Margaret Naumburg, Frank’s wife, “were entranced with each other from the first time they met,” the unhappy poet of Cane may have ended his friendship with Frank by seeking his revenge, in part, by seducing his mentor’s wife.145

  While Toomer was still reeling from Frank’s “betrayal,” Liveright requested that Toomer capitalize upon his African American ancestry in the publicity for Cane, and this, as it turned out, would further complicate his relationship to his publisher and his first book. It is clear that Toomer wanted to write about the Negro, but not be regarded as a Negro. In fact, it is also clear that Toomer wanted to break out of the race itself through art, transcending the Negro world in a manner, say, that never would have occurred to Irish writers such as William Butler Yeats or James Joyce. Toomer objected to the oversimplification of what he seems, at times, genuinely to have believed was a truly complex, new racial identity, one too subtle, hybrid, or nuanced to be classified by those gross signifiers “black” and “white,” especially to be exploited for the commercial purpose of selling the very book that he hoped would be his transport out of blackness. Accordingly, he refused to cooperate with Liveright, notwithstanding the risk that his refusal might jeopardize his book’s publication. Toomer defiantly declared his position on race and marketing in a well-known letter to Liveright, dated September 23, 1923: “First, I want to make a general statement from which detailed statements will follow. My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine…. As a unit in the social milieu, I expect and demand acceptance of myself on their basis. I do not expect to be told what I should consider myself to be.”146 But Toomer did not stop there: “As a Boni and Liveright author, I make the distinction between my fundamental position, and the position which your publicity department may wish to establish for me in order that Cane reach as large a public as possible. In this connection 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 advertisements for you. I have sufficiently featured Negro in Cane.”147 Toomer’s dispute with Liveright over his book’s marketing, following close upon his reaction to Frank’s foreword, only added insult to injury, further alienating him from Cane.

  It should not surprise us, then, that Alain Locke’s decision to reprint excerpts from Cane in The New Negro without Toomer’s permission just about drove Toomer to distraction: “But when Locke’s book, The New Negro, came out, there was the [Winold] Reiss portrait, and there was a story from Cane[Locke reprinted the stories “Carma” and “Fern,” as well as the poems “Georgia Dusk” and “Song of the Son”], and there in the introduction, were words about me which have caused as much or more misunderstanding than Waldo Frank’s.”148 Toomer felt betrayed by the two major figures at the center of the literary worlds that claimed him, and by both he felt completely misunderstood. But between the two, Toomer reserved his greater scorn for Locke: “However, there was and is, among others, this great difference between Frank and Locke. Frank helped me at a time when I most needed help. I will never forget it. Locke tricked and misused me.”149 Toomer seriously considered contesting Locke’s representation of him as a black writer, ultimately deciding against doing so because he was convinced that he probably could never correct the record, and fearing that his efforts at any sort of clarification would only contribute to the confusion. So Jean Toomer—despite his vehement objections—came to be known as a black writer through Cane, the book that ironically brought him the fame and acceptance in the literary world he had been seeking for so long.

/>   Toomer’s decision, just a few months after Cane’ s publication, to become a student of Georges I. Gurdjief, the Russian mystic and psychologist, and originator of the Gurdjief system or method, also contributed to his estrangement from the book. Throughout much of his adult life, Toomer had been in search of what he called an “intelligible scheme, a sort of whole into which everything ft,” and toward the end of 1923 he believed he had at last found this grand and unifying pattern in Gurdjief’s teachings. Toomer’s introduction to Gurdjief’s philosphy came through P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, which he read in December 1923. Ouspensky’s writings were the object of some fascination among the members of his literary community in Greenwich Village, particularly to Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, and Waldo Frank. After reading Ouspensky, Toomer acquired a pamphlet describing the history and mission of Gurdjief’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France. “In it I found expressed,” he wrote, “more completely and with more authority than with anything possible from me, just the conditions of man which I myself realized. Moreover, a method, a means of doing something about it was promised. It was no wonder that I went heart and soul into the Gurdjief work.” 150

  It should be emphasized that in Cane we find ample evidence of an orientation toward spiritual and philosophical concerns that would assume a larger, more marked significance in Toomer’s later writings. These concerns help to explain why he went “heart and soul into the Gurdjief work.” Even in his 1923 letter to Frank, Toomer had written of what he called the “spiritual entity behind the work.” A few years before his introduction to Gurdjief’s theories, Toomer, an autodidact who early on saw himself as a philosopher-poet, found as his great theme modernity’s attendant fragmentation and alienation. Cane is his most successful treatment of this theme, as it juxtaposes fragmentation with intense spirituality. Kerman and Eldridge describe the “spiritual entity” in the writing and in the writer thusly: “While others may have read Cane to see how a man could ft his human view into his blackness, Jean was trying to ft the blackness that was a part of him into a more comprehensive human view. Nor was he trying to ‘pass’ in a racial sense; rather, he was passing from preoccupations with external, visible reality to concentration on internal, invisible reality.”151 Perhaps. But Toomer did find a most original and compelling way to render the relation among fragmentation, alienation, and spirituality in the tripartite, lyrical form of Cane.

  In fact, the grand achievement of Toomer is this: Cane is, perhaps, the first work of fiction by a black writer to take the historical experiences and social conditions of the Negro, and make them the metaphor for the human condition, in this case, the metaphor for modernity itself. Du Bois had, famously and brilliantly, redefined the concept of “double consciousness” as a metaphor for the Negro’s duality, a duality created by racial segregation. For Du Bois, double consciousness was a malady, a malady that could be cured only by the end of segregation. For Toomer, however, fragmentation, or duality, is the very condition of modernity. It cannot be “cured,” any more than the gap between the conscious mind and the unconscious can be obliterated. Cane is a book about nothing if not fragmentation; it is a book about dualities, unreconciled dualities, and this theme is repeated in each of its sections, whether in the South or the North, whether in the country or the city, whether in the book’s black characters or its white characters. Everybody and everything is hopelessly, inescapably fragmented. And nowhere is this better expressed than in the “Kabnis” section of Cane, in this exchange between Lewis and Kabnis, each other’s alter egos, through Lewis’s list of binaries:

  Kabnis:…My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods.

  Lewis: And black.

  Kabnis: Aint much difference between blue and black.

  Lewis: Enough to draw a denial from you. Cant hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, fame of the great season’s multi-colored leaves, tarnished, burned. Split, shredded; easily burned. No use…

  The use of binary oppositions has a long history in African American literature, going back at least to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Du Bois transformed these in The Souls of Black Folk into the duality of the Negro citizen, a necessary and problematic by-product of anti-black racism and segregation. Toomer, however, takes Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, and boldly declares that this fragmentation is, ultimately, the sign of the Negro’s modernity, first, and that the Negro, therefore, is America’s harbinger of and metaphor for modernity itself. It is a stunningly brilliant claim, this rendering by Toomer of the American Negro as the First Modern Person. There is no end to the manifestations of fragmentation in Cane and no false gestures to the unity of opposites at the text’s end. No, in Cane, fragmentation is here to stay, for such is the stuff of modern life. When Kabnis ascends the stairs from his encounter with Father John in the basement at the end of the text, he carries a bucket of dead coals, undermining what would be the false nod to hope through reconciliation possibly suggested by the text’s image of a rising sun. Zora Neale Hurston revises this very scene at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God, having depicted her protagonist’s coming to voice not as the result of reconciling binaries, but of developing the capacity to negotiate back and forth between them, acutely mindful of the fragmentation that Toomer defined as the necessary precondition for finding one’s identity, an identity always split, or doubled, or divided. In Cane, Jean Toomer became a lyrical prophet of modernism. And then, abruptly, he decided to pursue other passages.

  In January 1924, Toomer marked his passing from “external, visible reality” to “internal, invisible reality” by attending lectures by Gurdjief and demonstrations of his method at Manhattan’s Leslie Hall and the Neighborhood Playhouse. He writes about how deeply moved he was by his first encounter with Gurdjief’s teachings. Gurdjief claimed that human beings are mechanical beings, and that they lack unity, and thus true consciousness. In the Gurdjief system there are four levels of consciousness: the sleeping state, waking consciousness, self-consciousness, and objective or cosmic consciousness. Advanced levels of consciousness can only be attained through the practice of such exercises as self-remembering or self-observation as well as non-identification. Practiced in one’s daily life, these exercises possessed the potential to liberate one from mechanical modes of thought and behavior, and to move one toward the attainment of higher levels of consciousness.

  Toomer, to say the least, was captivated by the promise of Gurdjief’s teachings. By the summer of 1924 he had left New York to study at Gurdjief’s institute in France. Put another way, in less than a year after the publication of Cane and when the Harlem Renaissance and other expressions of high cultural modernism were approaching their apex, Toomer had passed into a vastly different cultural orbit. When he returned to New York in early 1925, he set about in almost priestly fashion to promote the Gurdjief method through public lectures. It was as a Gurdjief lecturer that Hughes and Hurston first met Toomer in Harlem in 1925.

  Neither as a writer nor as a lecturer did Toomer earn an income substantial enough to support himself. Like his father Nathan Toomer, he was fortunate that he married well. In 1931, Toomer married the writer Margery Latimer, who died in 1932 after giving birth to their daughter, Margery Toomer. Two years later, Toomer married Marjorie Content, the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, and the former wife of Harold Loeb, the founder of the magazine Broom. Marjorie Content and Toomer came close to meeting one another in 1923 at her East Ninth Street townhouse, in the basement of which were the offices of Broom. Lola Ridge attempted to introduce Content to Toomer, whose work she admired, but she shyly demurred. Toomer married her in Taos, New Mexico, on September 1, 1934, with his former lover Georgia O’Keefe in attendance as witness. He would be her fourth and last husband.

  Prior to his marriage to Content, however, Toomer had developed a reputation as the i
namorato of two of the women who played central roles in the cultural world of American modernism. Its center of gravity shifted between Seven Arts, presided over to a very large degree by Waldo Frank, and the Photo-Secession Group, perhaps an even more exalted stratum of the arts, whose headquarters was Manhattan’s 291 Gallery, of which the photographer Alfred Stieglitz was the imperious head. Shortly after the publication of Cane in the fall of 1923, Toomer had an affair with Margaret Naumburg, an educator who also happened to be Waldo Frank’s wife, which not surprisingly led to the dissolution of their friendship.152 Sometime later in 1933, Toomer also had an affair with the artist Georgia O’Keefe during one of his visits to The Hill, Stieglitz and O’Keefe’s retreat on Lake George, New York.153 Toomer was extraordinarily handsome and beguiling, and no doubt cut a striking figure, often finding himself one of the very few swarthy men in the inner sanctums of white American modernism.

  As a result of his marriage to Marjorie Content, Toomer could continue with his work as a Gurdjief lecturer without fear of impoverishment. He would lecture on the Gurdjief method most intensely for the next two decades, not only in New York but in Chicago; Portage, Wisconsin; Taos, New Mexico; and Doylestown, Pennsylvania, his final home. Toomer continued to write novels, short stories, plays, aphorisms, and poems, but most of these bear the unmistakable imprint of Gurdjief’s philosophy and teachings, stimuli not nearly as fecund as the rural Georgian landscape. Except for autobiographical excerpts edited by Darwin T. Turner, including the poem “The Blue Meridian,” and Essentials, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, a collection of aphorisms, Toomer’s post-Cane writings remain largely unpublished. Lacking Cane’s lyrical originality, Toomer’s philosophical and psychological writings often read like sophomoric, prosaic, bloodless translations of Gurdjief’s philosophy and method.