A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings

African American Review, Spring, 1996 by Rudolph P. Byrd

The strong contrasts in the lives of Toomer and Larsen endow this double biography with a certain symmetry essential to the ordering of two very different and very distinct lives. Larson's decision to explore questions of race, gender, and identity against the backdrop of a seminal arts and political movement with the lives of Toomer and Larson as the framework is certainly original. Larson's effort to distill new meaning through this imaginative pairing of lives, thereby deepening our knowledge of a particular period, would possess greater force if there had been substantive as well as numerous points of intersection between the lives of his subjects.

The rich interplay of shared lives as well as shared intellectual interests which contribute to the success and appeal of Louis Simpson's Three on the Tower - a masterful examination of the lives of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams - is unfortunately lacking in Invisible Lives. Except for their rather brief meeting in 1925 at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, where Larsen was employed as a librarian and where Toomer was lecturing and presiding over a discussion group centering upon the psychological theories of Georges I. Gurdjieff, the lives of Larsen and Toomer never overlapped, or so the current state of scholarship suggests. Interestingly, there is an absence of agreement in the scholarship concerning when this first and last meeting actually occurred, as well as a certain vagueness regarding its impact upon Toomer and Larsen. According to Larson, the meeting between Toomer and Larsen occurred in the "fall of 1925" (42). In The Lives of Jean Toomer, Kerman and Eldridge write that this meeting occurred in the "late spring of 1925" (144). Further, Larson writes that subsequent discussions of Gurdjieff's theories and methods "were held in private homes," but he is unclear about the extent and nature of Larsen's participation in them. Kerman and Eldridge write that Toomer "met with the Harlem group for about a year" (144), and like Larson they neither describe nor characterize Larsen's participation in the discussions of the "Harlem group."

While there is apparently little overlap in the lives of Larsen and Toomer, Larson records one striking coincidence. One of the most favorable reviews of Larsen's Quicksand (1928) was written by Margery Latimer, the future first wife of Toomer. Published in the New York World in 1928, Latimer's laudatory review appeared three years after the Toomer/Larsen meeting at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library and three years before Toomer's controversial marriage to Latimer in 1931.

Invisible Lives begins in 1919 - the year in which, as Larson writes, Toomer reaffirmed his vocation as a writer, and in which Larsen married Elmer S. Imes, a shameless philanderer who serves as the inspiration for an early short story by Larsen ominously entitled "The Wrong Man." Larson's double biography begins in early adulthood; that is to say, at the precise moment when Toomer and Larsen have the world before them and, they hope, soon at their feet. Interestingly, as the narrative moves forward in time from 1919 to the respective deaths of Larsen and Toomer on March 30, 1964 and 1967 (curiously, they share the same death date), it also moves backward in time, for the penultimate section of this four-part biography is devoted completely to the childhoods of these writers. Three of the four sections in Invisible Lives are ordered by an alternating narrative. Very provocatively, the first section is entitled "In the Middle." In this section, Larson describes in a rather straightforward fashion the entrances of Toomer and Larsen into Manhattan's literary scene, beginning with the circumstances of Toomer's debut and ending with those which defined in part Larsen's entry into the glamorous world of letters. In contrast, "End Game," section 2 of the biography, ably sets forth the increasing problems of money, productivity, and personal alienation each author confronted, with the life of Larsen as the point of departure and Toomer's ever enlarging cluster of challenges as the destination. In "Childhood," section 3, Larson returns to the narrative patterns of section 1. "Invisible Darkness," the fourth and final section, is a rather brief and not always balanced judgment of the lives of Toomer and Larsen as adjudicated in the court of Larson.