Jean Toomer (1894–1967)

Well, this was different. The Library of America calls this a novel and maybe under some definition of a modernist novel, it may qualify. I don't read the modernists (or I do very rarely anyway) and I need my novels to have a structure or at least a plot. Although after having read that, I realize that if a structure is enough, then this indeed may be a novel. But that will also be true for linked stories collections. Or maybe I should stop trying to find a box to fit it under and just talk show more about the book.

The book is a mix of poems, stories, vignettes and even a mix of a play and a story at the very end. All the pieces have the same main topic - the life of African Americans in a world designed and ran by the whites. And Toomer takes a circular route into the topic - he starts with the South (Georgia), moves north (Washington) and then sends a northern man south to close the circle back in rural Georgia. And while this cycle ties the different texts together, it also highlighted the difference between the different parts.

The first one, the one set in the South reads like one of those stories that evolve around a fireplace - a mix of poetry and small stories and portraits of people and places, with repetitions inside of the same story and between stories. It sounds like a sing-song, even the parts that are obviously prose. Not all of those stories are nice, most of them are not but they all work as a whole and paints an image of a land steeped in legends and superstitions.

And as lyrical as that first part is, the second one pulls you out and throws you into the emerging jazz era of the big city. The same mix of prose and poetry reads very very differently and it loses the magic of the legends. It was intentional I think - it was supposed to show the new world but for some reason it sounded more crude and disjointed than a real counterpart of the first part.

And then comes the (almost) play, "Kabnis". A Northern black teacher moves to Georgia to teach and finds a community in the middle of a change. The lyrical language of the first part is back but now mixed with something else. The start is rough in the same way the very beginning of the novel is but once you get used to the dialect and the rhythm of the play/story, it slowly turns into the best part of the whole book. It is not just a play, there are parts of it which cannot be set on stage but using the play format allows the author not to look for scene transitions and connections and to set the acts he wants to.

Tradition meets jazz (and the new world), racism meets love and women meеt men -- most of the pieces deal with at least one of these pairs; the ones that do not deal with just one side of a pair. And somewhere under all these diverse stories and poems emerges a portrait of a time, told by a voice of someone who belongs to the Jazz era but lives outside of it.

At the end I liked this more than I expected to. I came into it with very low expectations - modernist fiction rarely works for me. And it took awhile for me to warm up to it. I still do not find the style appealing but I am happy I read this one. show less

A while ago I read Jean Toomer’s slim work of uncategorizable literature, Cane (1923). As well as being one of the peaks of American Modernism, it single-handedly raised my interest in the Harlem Renaissance. I read it twice, raved about it, used it to help kickstart this blog and was pleased as punch to receive this collection of his poetry (the first ever compiled, edited and introduced by Robert B. Jones for Chapel Hill/University of North Carolina Press in 1988) as a gift last show more year.

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was an open-minded individual. It would appear to have been his defining characteristic and is reflected in the directions of his poetry. Influences run the gamut over the decades. Pre-Cane, he drew equally on dead white Europe (specifically the French symbolist traditions) and on Oriental structures and thematics. So wandering from those obnoxious sound poems that were all the rage for a while to delicate pseudo-haiku:

"There, on the clothes-line
Still as she pinned them,
Pieces now the wind may wear."

Among the highlights are the playful linguistic riffs he made on the elements, defining the character of 'Air' as "I’ll try anything once" or that of 'Water' as "Saved from monotony by the ripples and currents of its flow."

The first genuinely Toomeresque poems from this era had a tendency to be recycled and put into Cane. Tender love poems such as 'Evening Song' and 'Her Lips Are Copper Wire,' the latter beginning with layers of formal image metaphors before the austere heart is revealed: "then with your tongue remove the tape/and press your lips to mine/till they are incandescent." 'Face' uses the same tactic, building an old woman’s portrait in metaphors beginning in beauty – her gray hair "like streams of stars" - only to reveal the horror of her pain and exhaustion and looming death as it proceeds.

From 1921 to 1923, Toomer’s focus was on the African-American experience, his stance that of a literary anthropologist. Well-educated and of mixed heritage, he felt himself an outsider among both black and white. His poems here based on folk song, or focused upon the conversion from pagan culture to Christian, and the image of the harvester predominates. The poems in this brief era are most likely going to be familiar to any who read this book and so the meat of new discovery comes in what are here labeled the Objective Consciousness period (from 1924 to 1939) and the Christian Existential period (’40 to ’55).

Post-Cane, Toomer lost interest in pursuing a literary career and only published an occasional poem. In his Objective Consciousness phase he found inspiration in the tenets of Gurdjieffian spiritualism. Jones, in his introduction, calls it an arcane and obscure philosophy and Toomer channeled that into several dense works, his themes now of transience and transcendence. The “centerpiece” of this time would technically be 'The Blue Meridian,' a 25-page epic of spiritual America which owes its existence to Whitman and naturally put me in mind of some of the Beat epics. And while it’s not going to be replacing 'Howl' and 'I Am Waiting' on my spiritual American roadmap, in several of the smaller poems he crafted absolute gems.

"There is a natty kind of mind
That slicks its thoughts,
Culls its oughts,
Trims its views,
Prunes its trues,
And never suspects it is a rind."

That’s one called 'Unsuspecting.' Equally enjoyable is 'The Gods Are Here,' wherein he sets forth that one has no need of primordial isolation or a hermetic wilderness to reach the Gods, that in a thoroughly banal landscape he knows "that if I touch them/I will arise/and take majesty into the kitchen."

This sort of thing can tread close to New Age treacle (a common hazard of spiritualism) but Toomer’s talent keeps it within reason. Other highlights include poems of place, emotions triggered by the American landscape from New Mexico to Maine, and poems of transience such as 'The Lost Dancer' with its mournful desire for unity of being:

"….He can find no source
Of magic adequate to bind
The sand upon his feet, his feet
Upon his dance, his dance upon
The diamond body of his being."

Last in chronology are the Quaker religious poems of his final years, better described as prayers. I have a small but growing interest in the Quakers due to the guiding light of Charles W. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf. For all their good points, the Quakers don’t encourage eclecticism. Toomer’s last set are all on the solitary topic of faith and the way to God, with the exception of 'To Gurdjieff Dying,' a bizarre insult in code to his former mentor. "Coiled as a serpent round the phallic Tau/and sacramental loaf" is an interesting thing to say but makes scarce sense to the non-specialist. None of these late era poems do much aesthetically, wholly reliant upon their spiritual purpose to make an impact. Though not memorable on their own, they make a heartfelt conclusion in the context of this book. "That as broken instrument/I may be mended, as an agent/to do Thy Will towards man,/And the awakening of kinsmen." That is entirely consistent with the visions of Woolman and Penn. It is their spiritualism wrapped in a poem.

Jean Toomer’s an excellent, underrated writer. If you haven’t read him, start with Cane. If you still want more, this little book is ideal and you should seek it out.

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Beautifully written short stories with lyrical poems in-between! I felt transported to that time, and that place, with the sweet taste of cane sugar teasing the tip of my tongue. So many words resonated with me with me, and the quotes below were my favorites!

“Wind is in the cane. Come along.”

“Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.”

“Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street.”

“…O pines, whisper to Jesus…

A wonderful, magisterial voice - at its best, up there with Whitman - but young and unfinished. It has that explosive, tightrope feel of some early works by brilliant writers. It's known as the first important Black novel of the Harlem Renaissance, which is funny because it's not a novel and Toomer liked to insist he wasn't Black. It's hard to see which he hated and feared the most - women or himself.