Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen

Frederick L. Rusch's A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings significantly enlarges our understanding of a major figure in American letters. The portrait of Jean Toomer which emerges from the seven sections of Rusch's expertly edited reader is of an artist engaged in an ambitious and lifelong intellectual project which found expression in a correspondence with many of the leading intellectuals of his generation, as well as in such genres as the aphorism, the essay, fiction, and autobiography.

The materials of section 1 of A Jean Toomer Reader provide insight into Toomer's mood and outlook shortly before the publication of Cane (1923). In this section, one discovers a collection of letters by Toomer to such writers as Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, and Gorham Munson. Of particular importance is the inclusion of Toomer's reply to an inquiry from the editors of The Liberator in which he makes his first public statement regarding his ancestry. Spanning the months between July 1922 and March 1923, these letters chart the stages of Canis composition, its principles of organization, and its deep structure, along with Toomer's mounting sense of excitement as well as anxiety in the weeks before the publication of his first and last book of fiction. These letters also chart Toomer's evolving friendship with Frank and Munson: the former in whom Toomer confided his yearnings and ambitions as a writer deeply affected by the South, the latter in whom Toomer confided his deep awareness of Frank's influence as well as his effort to preserve the distinctive sound of his own emerging written voice. Rusch's orderly sequencing of these letters yields fresh insight into the process of Cane's composition as well as Toomer's disposition during this fruitful period in his literary career. While there is some necessary repetition, Rusch's fine selection of letters builds upon Toomer's correspondence from this period which appears in the Norton edition of Cane edited by Darwin Turner.

Section 2 of A Jean Toomer Reader is composed solely of an autobiographical excerpt entitled "The Experience." The longest work of prose in the reader, "The Experience" is taken from part II of the unpublished and twice- rejected autobiography "From Exile into Being," which Toomer wrote between 1937 and 1946. By including this excerpt from one of Toomer's six autobiographies, Rusch expands the extant body of published writings by Toomer. "The Experience" and other excerpts from "From Exile into Being" do not appear in Turner's The Wayward and the Seeking, the first collection of writings by Toomer. Guided by a different objective as an editor, the emphasis in Turner's collection is upon the forces which shaped Toomer's development as an artist, whereas Rusch emphasizes those forces which shaped Toomer's development as a spiritual reformer. In their very fine biography of Toomer, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness, Cynthia E. Kerman and Richard Eldridge provide perceptive analysis of the expansion of consciousness recorded in "The Experience." Now for the first time we have not only an analysis of this out-of-body experience which occurred on an April evening at the 66th Street "L" station in Manhattan, but we also have Toomer's own artful and detailed rendering of it.

The third and fourth sections of Rusch's reader are comprised of cultural and literary criticism focusing upon the New Negro Movement and Toomer's growing alarm regarding the expansion and uses of technology. Section 5 is comprised solely of an undated short story entitled "Monrovia," a story of love and death with all the trappings of a fairy tale. Toomer's poetic observations regarding the relationship between region and imagination are the focus of section 6 of A Jean Toomer Reader. The briefest and most eclectic, the seventh and final section of the reader contains an essay, letters and excerpts from letters to Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, and an aphorism. Spanning the years 1934 to 1946, this section is dominated by Toomer's tribute to his friends O'Keeffe and Stieglitz.

Rusch's reader spans the years 1922 to 1948, and each of the seven sections is preceded by useful commentary which evokes the historical and literary context for each selection. A Jean Toomer Reader is an important work of scholarship. It enriches and complicates, through the medium of Toomer's own written thoughts, our knowledge and estimation of the philosopher-poet who occupies a central place in the evolving tradition of American and African American letters.

While the emphasis in Rusch's A Jean Toomer Reader is upon the scope and context of Toomer's writings as a spiritual reformer from 1922 to 1948, the very complex life of the man who produces them is one of two subjects in Invisible Darkness, an effort by Charles R. Larson to make the lives of Toomer and Nella Larsen at last visible to contemporary readers. The provocative title of Larson's double biography, the first to focus upon two major figures of the New Negro Movement, is also an artful play upon race and the slippery practice of racial classification. As a biographer, Larson seeks not only to cast aside the darkness that presumably still obscures the lives of Toomer and Larsen (a strange intimation given the enlarging body of work on these two writers), but also to reveal the dark or African strain in the lives of two authors of mixed ancestry. Although not always cast with an awareness of the current scholarship on race (bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Anthony Appiah), definitions and constructions of race, along with their translation into works of literature, are the themes at the very core of Larson's argument to join the lives of Toomer and Larsen into a single biography.