The Photographic Print, the Literary Negative: Alfred Stieglitz and Jean Toomer

CHARLES SCRUGGS The Photographic Print, the Literary Negative: Alfred Stieglitz and Jean Toomer s a modernist, Jean Toomer in Cane (1923) used spatial form -and imagism to help structure his collage of poems, sketches, and stories, and he was also fond of photographic moments—from the description of Karintha as "a black bird that flashes in light" to the "soft circle" of light that envelops Father John and Carrie K at the end of "Kabnis."1 It is curious then that his relationship with the revolutionary photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, has never been explored, especially as Stieglitz was an important member of the intellectual milieu to which Toomer belonged. The significance ofthat relationship becomes clear if we look at two striking visual images oftwo famous buildings: Stieglitz's celebrated photograph of New York's Flatiron Building (1903) and Toomer's verbal portrait of Washington, D.Cs Capitol in his short story "Avey." The appearance of the Capitol in "Avey" marks a turning point in the story because the narrator is implicated in the very history he attempts to record: he becomes a witness in a way that is quite different from the act of witnessing defined by Paul Rosenfeld in his classic essay on Stieglitz in the 192 1 issue of The Dial. On the surface, Toomer held Stieglitz the artist in very high esteem. When in 1922 Toomer told Gorham Munson that "mystery cannot help but accompany a deep, clear-cut image," he would later repeat almost the same words to praise the photographer's art. Yet the collage effect of Cane, with its use of overlapping images that continually return to the terror of American history, created a Gothic world that lay Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 1997 Copyright © 1 997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 16 10 02Charles Scruggs outside Stieglitz's view of America. For Stieglitz, the. Flatiron Building symbolized America's promising future, and photography's function was to bring the hidden to light, to "bring," as he said, "what is not visible to the surface."2 A part of Toomer shared this optimistic vision of America, as his Whitmanesque poem, "The Blue Meridian" (1936), indicates , but another part did not, for he showed in Cane that the demonic forces that had shaped America's past might also determine its future. Ironically, Cane's critique of Stieglitz would also be a critique of a group of American intellectuals whose ideas about American culture Toomer wanted to embrace.3 In late 1922, Toomer complained to Gorham Munson that Sherwood Anderson's remarks in the New Republic about Stieglitz could be reduced to "the obvious statement that the artist loves his tools." And then he added, with some anger: "The Stieglitz that came to me through Our America cannot be trifled with." Toomer's complaint about Anderson was in the nature of a family quarrel since they both belonged to a group of literary admirers ofthe famous photographer (both would contribute to a Festschrift celebrating the man and his art in 1934, America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait), and Toomer admired Anderson 's short stories almost as much as he did Stieglitz's photographs. Moreover, the Stieglitz not "to be trifled with" was not only the photographer mediated through Toomer's favorite book of cultural criticism , Waldo Frank's Our America ( 1919), but also through Paul Rosenfeld 's article on Stieglitz in The Dial, later revised as the centerpiece of Port of New York (1924), an essay which Susan Sontag has called "the finest . . . ever written in praise ofphotography." Rosenfeld was another "family" member, and he and Frank would introduce Toomer to The Seven Arts (1916-17), a "little magazine" of the Progressive Era that by 1922 had become legendary for its brave resistance to the patriotic hysteria that attended America's entry into World War I. The intellectuals who wrote for that magazine, and the younger generation that followed them, would have a considerable influence upon Toomer as he was composing Cane, especially Waldo Frank.4 Gorham Munson has said that Our America "dazzled my immediate generation," and he noted elsewhere (in a passage that caught Toomer's eye) that the book...