The Strange Literary Career of Jean Toomer

Well before Jean Toomer spent two months as acting principal at Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in rural Georgia in the fall of 1921, he had decided on a literary vocation. He meant, furthermore, not to be just any writer, but the kind of serious artist who would produce something worthy of the name “literature”—a self-consciously avant-garde writer responsive to trends in what he understood to be the most advanced zone of the literary field. Hence his move from Washington, DC, to Greenwich Village, initially at the outset of 1920, and later for a longer period beginning in 1923.

We can only idly speculate as to how Jean Toomer might have developed as a writer had he not gone to Sparta and experienced the connection to Southern black history and culture that proved formative to the writing of Cane (1923), the book for which he would be primarily known in his lifetime and for which alone he is posthumously remembered. But I aim here to illuminate several literary-historical problems by recovering Toomer, the aspiring author before his success with Cane, and revisiting the question of what happened to him after Cane in light of his original literary ambition, which never clearly subsided.¹ More specifically, through the strange case of Jean Toomer I hope to stimulate some fresh reflection upon the relationship between idiosyncrasy and regularity in literary careers; upon the opportunities and barriers met by African American writers within a literary field that came to be increasingly pressured by modernist norms; and upon the ambiguous status of works critically classified as “Negro,” not least when this is supposed to operate as a mark of distinction.

Toomer and the Aristocracy of Culture

My conception of the literary field owes much to the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu, but it owes at least as much to the testimony of literary aspirants themselves. Toomer’s point of view in this respect tells us not only about the existence and nature of the distinct subfield or zone of literary production he managed to access, but reveals this world’s attractions for someone in his particular social position and bearing his particular complex of dispositions.² His most thorough account of his literary career is in the autobiographical fragment “On Being an American,” written around 1934 in a context of considerable frustration due to his inability to find a publisher for “Eight-Day World,” the novel he considered his true literary masterpiece.³ One runs the risk of arbitrarily privileging any one of Toomer’s several autobiographical records to produce a more race-conscious, more postracial, more spiritual, more political, or more aesthetic Toomer to fit one’s argument. Toomer presents a problem, moreover, in being unusually conversion-prone, and thus in using autobiography rather obviously to defend fluctuating attitudes. I venture to argue nonetheless that his “conversion” to the literary-intellectual life around 1917 was a kind of ur conversion, a prelude to and precondition for the various positions and postures Toomer took up from 1918 to 1936, if not for the rest of his life. His discovery of the “intensely interesting world” of literature in the pages of Bernard Shaw—which led him to Ibsen, then to “the literature of modern England,” then to Greenwich Village, where the prospect of contributing to modern American literature lay before him—“was like a miracle. One day I was one thing. The next, I was a different person. Some fundamental turnover occurred, a transformation. I left the old person behind and became new—and this was my birth” (31–32). “On Being an American” is largely a once-triumphant literary artist’s story of his conversion to and disillusionment with the ideals, ethos, and practices of what he called “the modern American literary world” (34). But it is not an apostate’s narrative, for Toomer was not so disenchanted or alienated as to forsake all claims upon and belief in that world, as his desperate attempt to place “Eight- Day World” between 1933 and 1935 plainly shows.

A chief source of that world’s attraction for Toomer was its...