Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank ed. by Kathleen Pfeiffer, and: Cane: A Norton Critical Edition by Jean Toomer (review)

Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Waldo Frank, author of Our America (1919) and Holiday (1923), were intimate friends who greatly influenced each other's writing. Toomer's letters to Frank were edited by Mark Whalan and published in 2006, but prior to the release of Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, edited by Kathleen Pfeiffer, their complete correspondence had not been published. Through assiduous archival research, Pfeiffer presents the full arc of Toomer and Frank's homosocial bond and eventual estrangement. Juxtaposing Brother Mine and Cane enriches our understanding of the complex language in Toomer's modernist masterpiece. Pfeiffer's book also chronicles a salient episode in relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans: the trip that Toomer and Frank took to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where Frank, a Jew, passed as an African American. Furthermore, readers interested in modernist letters will find Pfeiffer's text a worthy companion to the recently published correspondence between Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz. The descriptions and insights that Toomer and Frank poured into their letters rival the best writing in their published works.

Recent criticism on Cane has tried to displace Frank's influence on Toomer in favor of the latter's involvement with African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Pfeiffer's expertise on Waldo Frank's life and work enables her to reestablish the important role he played in shaping Cane. Her informative introduction and biographical notes provide a framework for reading the letters, and by using references to events and dated letters in undated letters, she has painstakingly reconstructed the chronology of Toomer and Frank's correspondence. Most importantly, Brother Mine refocuses scholars' attention on Toomer's and Frank's writing from the "Cane Years," 1919-1924. Too much scholarship privileges their revisionist accounts of their friendship, which were distorted by the political, religious, and philosophical preoccupations of their later years.

The primary critical intervention that Pfeiffer offers is that, contrary to Toomer's later claims, his estrangement from Frank was not due to his disappointment over his friend's foreword to Cane. Pfeiffer writes,

Frank's foreword to Cane, Toomer charged in later autobiographical writings, wounded him deeply, because Frank presented Toomer primarily as a black writer instead of emphasizing the multiethnic identity he preferred. Their letters, however, provide no evidence whatsoever that Toomer felt betrayed by Frank's foreword; instead, they actually vitiate that claim, not only by showing Toomer's enthusiastic gratitude for Frank's essay, but also in demonstrating Toomer's willingness to be identified as Negro well after he read Frank's foreword.

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Pfeiffer also counters the attendant claim that Frank fetishized Toomer's blackness. She argues, "To be sure, Waldo Frank's well-known tendency toward arrogant pomposity reveals itself in his comments on race here, yet his attempts to assure Toomer of his sympathetic racial politics are poignant in their bumbling earnestness" (9). Pfeiffer cites the real cause of their breakup as having been Toomer's "astonishing betrayal of Waldo Frank," the affair he had with Frank's wife, Margaret Naumberg (18). Frank is figured as the victim in Pfeiffer's retelling of this story.

There is much in these letters to substantiate the general contours of Pfeiffer's argument. It is true that Toomer expresses his approval of Frank's foreword throughout their correspondence, and that he conveys a tremendous sense of gratitude toward Frank. Frank is indeed earnest regarding his racial identification with Toomer. However, I think Pfeiffer goes too far in characterizing Toomer and Frank's relationship as a solid bond that is shattered by Toomer's affair with Naumberg. As in Cane itself, these letters also contain a subtext signaling Toomer's...