Print
Email
Cite
Toomer, Jean
American writer whose experimental novel of Southern life, Cane, profoundly influenced twentieth-century black writers.Jean Toomer's position in the canon of African American literature rests on his haunting narrative of Southern life, Cane. Despite Toomer's later ambivalence toward his racial identity, the novel has been rediscovered by successive generations of black writers since its original publication in 1923. Toomer, who was racially mixed but able to pass for white, sought a unifying thesis that would resolve the conflicts of his identity. He spent his life trying to evade the categories of American racial and ethnic identification, which he believed constricted the complexity of a lineage like his.As a writer, Toomer was nurtured by Greenwich Village progressive aesthetes of the 1910s and 1920s, such as Waldo Frank and Hart Crane. His inspiration for Cane, however, came from his two-month stint as a substitute principal at the black Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia in 1921. Entranced by Georgia's rural geography and its black folk traditions, he saw in Southern life the harmony that escaped him, although he believed the rich black culture was disappearing through migration to the North and its encounter with modernity.Cane is a series of vignettes; its narrative structure moves from the South to the North and back to the South, forming a troubled synthesis of the two regions. The book was a commercial failure when first published, but critics lauded it, initiating a chorus of praise that has spanned generations. Members of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, as well as later African American women writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, have cited its influence and acclaimed the author's sensitive treatment of black folk life, his formal elegance, and his progressive, uninhibited approach to sexuality and gender.Cane was Toomer's only work that explicitly treated the lives of African Americans, and the author disappeared from literary circles after its publication. In 1924 the restless Toomer made the first of several pilgrimages to Fontainebleau, France, to study with mystic and psychologist Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Gurdjieff believed that a transcendent essence, obscured by a socially determined personality, could be recovered through his teachings. Through Gurdjieff, Toomer found a way to express his attempts at defining a holistic identity. He taught Gurdjieff's philosophy in Harlem in New York and in Chicago, Illinois, until his break with the mystic in the mid-1930s.Toomer wrote voluminously until his death. Although much of his writing received occasional praise for its experimentation, it was largely dismissed by African American critics, who saw it not only as propaganda for Gurdjieff's teachings but also as being white-identified. Indeed, in 1930 Toomer declined to be included in James Weldon Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry, on the grounds that he was not a Negro. Toomer continued to strive for a sense of wholeness, however, and for a definition of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has described as a “remarkably fluid notion of race.” He found this in the potential of an “American” race, described in the 1936 long poem Blue Meridian as a hybrid “blue,” comprising the black, the white, and the red races. Blue Meridian was Toomer's last work to be published while he was alive.See also Literature, African American; Poetry, Black, in English.Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
