Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Kathleen Pfeiffer

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more recently, Frederick L. Rusch's A Jean Toomer Reader (1993) presents some of Toomer's letters and his previously unpublished material.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.