Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer: A Literary Relationship

SHERWOOD ANDERSON AND JEAN TOOMER: A LITERARY RELATIONSHIP Mary Jane Dickerson* An examination of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Jean Toomer's Cane provides evidence of a link in the development of these two writers who so influenced the growth of twentieth-century American fiction. Anderson's Winesburg (1919) directly affected American fiction in the twenties. Malcolm Cowley speaks of him as "a writer's writer, the only story teller of his generation who left his mark on the style and vision of the generation that followed."1 And, as Arna Bontemps says about the impact of Cone's publication in 1923, "a few sensitive and perceptive people went quietly mad. . . . Among the most affected was practically an entire generation of young Negro writers then just beginning to emerge; their reactions to Toomer's Cane marked an awakening that soon thereafter began to be called a Negro Renaissance."2 They knew each other's work and both were part of a particular literary group that included many mutual friends: Hart Crane, Alfred Steiglitz, Paul Rosenfeld, and especially the novelist-critic Waldo Frank. Certain similarities in structure and theme, such as the use of the unifying narrator-observer, character sketches functioning as structural devices, the focus on women to examine the inner life, and the use of the larger framework of a disappearing rural and small town American landscape, suggest that Winesburg influenced the shaping of Cane. Further, Anderson's novel Dark Laughter (1925) supplies interesting evidence that Cane had a thematic influence on Anderson's handling of his story material. Sherwood Anderson mentioned Toomer favorably in a letter to Roger Sergal in 1923: "I've a notion also that all an artist dare ask is that there be other artists living and working in his medium in his time. This year I have had you and the Negro Toomer added to my list of realities. I think that makes it a pretty rich year. I am older, in years, but I am sure that it has meant something in your work that Dreiser was here before you. Toomer, I am sure, can do a real book younger in his life because I have worked here."3 These few words strongly imply that Anderson was aware of an affinity between them as story tellers.4 And, S. P. Fullinwider, citing from the unpublished Toomer papers at Fisk University, mentions his reading Robert Frost, Sherwood Anderson, 'Professor Dickerson is a member of the Department of English of the University of Vermont. 164Mary Jane Dickerson and the imagists: "He wrote incessantly, hour upon hour for month after month, tearing up what he wrote. He learned to handle words, learned their symbolic potential."5 Possibly in addition to the "symbolic potential" of words, the young writer learned something about Anderson's shaping of the body of his material that eventually helped him to develop his own loose yet thematically controlled creation of Cane. Anderson's and Toomer's friendship with Waldo Frank came at particularly crucial times in their literary development. Anderson and Frank spent considerable time together during the summer of 1916 discussing Winesburg before its eventual publication in 1919.ß And in 1922, Frank accompanied Toomer on a trip to Georgia, an experience that directly inspired the composition of Cane.1 Frank's periods of time spent with each writer may be only coincidental to the parallels between the structure and theme of Winesburg and Cane, but the parallels suggest an influence at work.8 A distinctive similarity between Winesburg and Cane is their lack of any conventional plot structure. In his Memoirs, Anderson commented on the form of Winesburg: "I have even sometimes thought that the novel form does not fit an American writer, that it is a form which had been brought in. What is wanted is a new looseness; and in Winesburg I had made my own form. There were individual tales but all about lives in some way connected. . . . Life is a loose flowing thing. There are no plot stories in life."9 Frank's fulsome introduction to Cane expresses a similar impression about the relationship between technique and meaning: ". . . the very looseness and unexpected waves of the...