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Jean Toomer was an American poet, writer, philosopher, novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism.
Jean Toomer’s family was not typical of migrating African-Americans settling in the North, or fleeing the South. Each of his maternal grandparents were born of a Caucasian father. But a “speck of Black makes you Black.”
Thus, Toomer’s grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, was a free born black, a Union officer in the Civil War and was elected to the office of Lieutenant Governor and later Acting Governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction.
Pinchback retired north and settled his family in the Negro community of the capitol. Thus, Toomer was born, as Nathan Pinchback Toomer into an upper class Negro family in Washington D.C. on December 26, 1894.
Like his parents, Toomer could easily pass for white. Indeed, throughout his formative years until age eighteen, he lived alternately as white and as African American. In 1895, Nathan Toomer abandoned his family, forcing Nina and her son to live with her somewhat tyrannical father in Washington. P. B. S. Pinchback agreed to support them only under the condition that the boy’s name be changed. Though his name was not legally altered, his grandparents thereafter called him Eugene Pinchback; in school he was known as Eugene Pinchback Toomer. (Later when he began writing, he shortened his name to Jean Toomer.) According to Toomer’s biographers Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge, “For Jean to grow up in a house with a grandfather who had been the only black governor of any state in the Union … could not help shaping the perceptions and attitudes of the fatherless boy.” In Washington Toomer lived in a white neighborhood but attended the all-black Garnet Elementary School.
When his mother remarried in 1906, the family moved to New Rochelle, New York, where they lived in a white neighborhood and he attended an all-white school. Toomer returned to Washington in 1909, following the death of his mother, and attended the all-black Dunbar High School. After graduation in 1914, he renounced racial classifications and sought to live not as a member of any racial group but as an American.
For the next three Years Toomer studied agriculture, physical education, psychology, and literature at several colleges and universities, including the University of Wisconsin (1914-1915), the Massachusetts College of Agriculture (1915), the American College of Physical Training at Chicago (1916), the University of Chicago (1916), the City College of New York (1917), and New York University (1917), although he never took a degree. It was during these years, however, that he was preparing to be a writer, by attending off-campus lectures on naturalism, atheism, psychology, evolution and socialism and by reading numerous philosophical and literary works, such as those by William Shakespeare, George Santayana, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Sherwood Anderson, Leo Tolstoy, and all the major American poets, especially the imagists. In 1920 he met Waldo Frank, who introduced him to several literary circles and later wrote an extremely laudatory introduction to the first edition of Cane. Toomer eventually became friends with many literary critics and luminaries, including Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, and Alfred Stieglitz.
Between 1918 and 1923 Toomer wrote the short stories “Bona and Paul” and “Withered Skin of Berries,” the plays Natalie Mann (1922) and Balo (1922), and many poems such as “Five Vignettes,” “Skyline,” “Poem in C,” “Gum,” “Banking Coal,” and “The First American.” The urtext for both “Brown River Smile” and The Blue Meridian, “The First American” was a lyrical expression of his racial and democratic idealism.
Formally introduced to the philosophy of idealism in 1920, for more than eight months Toomer abandoned writing to study Eastern philosophy. He came into contact with an entirely new body of ideas. Buddhist philosophy, the Eastern teachings, occultism, theosophy… These ideas challenged and stimulated him. Despite his literary purpose, Toomer was compelled to know something more about them and his religious nature, given a cruel blow by Clarence Darrow and naturalism, but not, as he found, destroyed by them — his religious nature which had been sleeping was vigorously aroused.
As an idealist philosopher, Toomer proposed the power of the mind to reconcile and transcend the self and the world. “In life nothing is only physical,” he maintained, “there is also the symbolical. White and Black. West and East. North and South. Light and Darkness. In general, the great contrasts. The pairs of opposites. And I, together with all other I’s, am the reconciler.” Based on his studies in orientalism, Toomer formulated theories of being and consciousness, and when he returned to writing in 1921 he sought literary equivalents for his idealism.
Symbolist and imagist aesthetics provided those equivalents, derived from both French and American sources. Of the French symbolists Toomer’s mentor was Baudelaire, whose Petits poйmes en prose provided models for the prose poems and lyrical sketches in Cane; of the American symbolists it was Walt Whitman, whose democratic idealism and mystical conception of the self appealed to Toomer’s idealist imagination. Symbolist idealism also figures prominently in his early fascination with imagism. In his attempts to fashion experience as a mystical moment of vision, and to create the immediacy and presentness of portraiture of literature, he found imagist aesthetics to be compatible with his own. “Their insistence on fresh vision and on the perfect clean economical line was just what I had been looking for. I began feeling that I had in my hands the tools for my own creation.” Imagist poetics thus provided for him the ideal medium to make the reader “see,” almost in mystical fashion, the distilled essence of an insight or experience.
In September 1921 Toomer traveled to Sparta, Georgia, where for two months he served as interim principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute. Living as an African American in the rural South stimulated his racial consciousness, and he used this newly found identification with his racial past to create the poems, prose poems, lyrical narratives, and short stories in his lyrical novel and master-work, Cane (1923). While many critics have credited this work with ushering in the Harlem Renaissance, noting the book’s representations of African-American characters and culture, others have located it within the Lost Generation, owing to its literary experimentation, its romantic primitivism, and its critiques of postwar values. Part one of the book presents portraits of six women of the rural South, in a style reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s gallery of grosteques in Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Part two shifts to the urban North, using paysage moralisй settings in Washington, D.C., and Chicago to depict the modern world as a postwar wasteland. In Part three, “Kabnis,” the setting shifts back to the rural South and dramatizes a portrait of an artist struggling to represent the parting soul of the African-American past in art. Robert Bone has noted that Toomer participated on equal terms with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and T S. Eliot in the creation of a new, modern idiom during the 1920s, and he ranks Cane with Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) in the tradition of the African-American novel.
Shortly after the publication of Cane, Toomer began studying the austere idealism of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, and in 1924, 1926, and 1927 he attended the Gurdjieff Institute for Harmonious Development at the Château Le Prieuré in Fontainebleau, France. Until 1935, when he distanced himself from Gurdjieff, Toomer preached the gospel of higher consciousness and spiritual self-development. Yet he continued his profession as a writer. Indeed, the years between 1923 and 1935 were the most productive of Toomer’s literary career.
In 1925 the symbolist sketch “Easter” was published in Little Review, and in 1927 Toomer completed a burlesque novel, The Gallonwerps, and a modern morality play, The Sacred Factory. In 1928 he wrote the short story “Skillful Dr. Coville” while “Winter on Earth,” another short story, was published in The Second American Caravan and the short story “Mr. Costyve Duditch” in the Dial. In 1929 he collected ten of his stories in a volume titled “Lost and Dominant” (unpublished), while the poems “White Arrow” and “Reflections” appeared in the Dial. In that same year, “Lettre D' Amérique,” an essay on the election of Herbert Hoover as president and its impact on American values, was published (in French) in Bifur while his essay “Race Problems and Modern Society” appeared in Problems of Civilization. Also in 1929 York Beach, his psychological novella set in Maine, was published in The New American Caravan. In 1931 Toomer completed his long poem The Blue Meridian, a lyrical affirmation of democratic idealism modeled after Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” which was published in The New Caravan in 1936, and Essentials, a book of aphorisms.
Also in 1931 Toomer conducted his highly publicized Gurdjieffian “Cottage Experiment,” a summer workshop in psychological and social development held in Portage, Wisconsin. During this workshop he met and married Margery Latimer, author of This Is My Body (1930) and Guardian Angel and Other Stories (1932). They lived in an artist colony in Carmel, California. Toomer recounts this time in their lives, and the adverse publicity surrounding their interracial marriage, in his unpublished novel “Caromb” (1932). In August 1932 Latimer died while giving birth to their daughter, Margery. During this year the poem “Brown River Smile” appeared in Pagany, and the poem “As the Eagle Soars” was published in the Crisis. In 1933 he wrote a closet drama on modernism and dehumanization, Man’s Home Companion. In 1934 Toomer published an essay on spiritual development, “A New Force for Cooperation,” in Adelphi and an essay tribute to Stieglitz titled “The Hill” in America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait.
In the spring of 1934 Jean Toomer meets Marjorie Content, the daughter of a very wealthy member of the New York Stock Exchange, and friend of his former lover Georgia O’Keefe, and soon to be famous photographer. Marjorie had already been married three times — her second husband was Harold Loeb, whom Ernest Hemingway portrayed as the infamous Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises. In 1924 Content had been a partner of the Sunwise Turn bookstore, the location of Orage’s first New York talk on the Gurdjieff System. However, Content is no longer interested in Gurdjieff and to win her, Toomer acts as though he is no longer interested in Gurdjieff. Of course the press didn’t miss the similarity of names of Toomer’s women, Margaret, Margery, and Marjorie. They marry in Taos, New Mexico that year in September at the home of Toomer’s wealthy friend Mabel Dodge Luhan and her Navajo husband.
The newly-weds return to New York City and convene a salon to which Georgia O’Keefe and many of his Gurdjieff friends visit. In December they buy a large farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania near Doylestown. Gurdjieff soon visits New York again but responds to Toomer as he would to a student who is not making serious effort. Toomer put off by this fallen position decides Gurdjieff’s teaching is dead, no longer what he learned 10 years earlier. Yet his ties to Gurdjieff disciples remain alive.
With his daughter Margery, Jean Toomer and Marjorie moved in spring of 1935 to Doylestown (in Bucks county, Pennsylvania). In late 1935, five year old Paul Beekman Taylor, whose mother was a Gurdjieff student, an ex-lover of Toomer, and a friend of Marjorie, goes to live with the Toomers as a friend/playmate of Margery.
Contrary to Marjorie’s wishes, Toomer again tries an experiment in communal living in 1936 — the Millhouse Experiment. Using residents and visitors to the Mill House, Toomer developed and practiced the concepts published in two Gurdjieff system books Living is Developing (1936) and Work Ideas (1937). Working individually and in groups, Toomer’s students restore an abandoned grist mill and also farm large tracts of land. Meanwhile, Toomer continues to womanize. His wife, determined to make the marriage work, overlooks it.
Faced with deteriorating kidneys impairing his health, along with his wife’s rising ire at the cost of upkeep of a farm that can’t pay for itself, Toomer is forced to give up the communal experiment. It will mark his last attempt to replicate life at the Prieuré.
By 1939, Toomer began to wonder if the Gurdjieff method he had been learning and practicing needed supplanting or supplementing, but he was reluctant to jump paths without a wise teacher. About this time, Marjorie Content Toomer met, by coincidence, a member of the small religious sect called the Religious Society of Friends (or Quakers) in a Doylestown fish market. Soon after, Jean’s daughter Margery was attending the Friends School and the family began attending meetings of the Quakers.
In June 1939 came a lengthy trip to India for Toomer to find the aforementioned teacher and where he visited Monks, Lamas, theosophists, and the poet Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan. Though at the time he suffered from the feeling of personal and professional failure, he could not express it. “He thought,” his wife recounts, “that maybe the mystics could find the answers.” The trip took nine months, much of that time in travel to and from India, and cost the equivalent of several times an average annual salary.
In August 1940, Toomer formally becomes a Quaker, a member of the Religious Society of Friends and becomes a much sought after lecturer. In 1941 Marjorie’s father Harry dies, but leaving the bulk of his money to a new wife. So Jean and Marjorie have only the Doylestown house.
In 1943 Jean Toomer seeks out the psychic Edgar Cayce about the failure of his operation, his lack of stamina, and insomnia. Cayce recommends a purification of his alimentary canal, X-ray treatments on the sides of the spinal column, and a diet. This helped for a while but the pain returned in 1943.
In 1947 and 1949, Toomer was invited by the Friends General Conference to write long statements to be published as pamphlets. An Interpretation of Friends Worship was called, by the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, “a significant contribution to the literature on Quaker worship.” 1949’s The Flavor of Man received a similar reception. In 1949, he gave the Quaker's prestigious William Penn lecture.
There is some natural overlap of the Gurdjieffian system and Quakerism, though Gurdjieff’s formulation is much more specific, complex, and is staggering in its difficulty, while stages and dangers are identified, and the exercises and activities designed for each stage are tailored for the individual by a teacher who has made significant progress on the scale. While Gurdjieff insisted no one take what is taught without trying it for themselves, the Quakers, emphasizing direct experience, were taught not to take teachings secondhand, on hearsay, but should live in direct contact with the spirit that guided the teachers. A foundation of all effort in both systems is a reach for a level of consciousness beyond that on which people ordinarily live. In addition, the individual’s responsibility for his own development is a tenet of both traditions — there is no priest or intermediary who can achieve one’s improvement, though there is a point, after sufficient effort, when a kind of divine force may intervene.
Almost everything in Toomer’s writing and speaking to the Society of Friends was an echo of something Gurdjieff taught. After intense study of the great thinkers of the tradition, Toomer translated what he had learned (and in some cases distilled or distorted) from Gurdjieff and Orage into the language of the Quakers.
Though Toomer’s external activities during the Quaker years seem as full as ever, his internal life seems weak. He suffered, perhaps not unrelated, physical and psychical illnesses. Physically, there were reoccurring eye problems, gall bladder problems, insomnia, congestion, impeded breathing, kidney problems. Psychically, there remained continual blindness to delusions of grandeur — Jean Toomer as a teacher without need to be taught. There remained continual unresolved problems with the African heritage of his racial makeup (his daughter Margery was not told any of her racial heritage). Thus, a procession of doctors passed through his life, as well as nontraditional techniques of Edgar Cayce, the Alexander technique, and of Jungian Analysis. So of course, Gurdjieff’s notion of internal considering exhibited outwardly. In the Spring in 1948 in New York Jean Toomer meets Gurdjieff again. Afterwards Toomer writes, “I do not really know myself, who I am, my selfhood, my spiritual identity, or what I am. [After 25 years] I have some information about it, but also some misinformation, some misunderstanding, but much illusion. Real motivations? What is my aim, assuming that I have but one aim? I do not really know my wife, my child, my closest friends. I do not know anyone or anything.”
On October 30, 1949, Gurdjieff dies of cancer.
In 1950 Toomer felt he was “discounted” by Gurdjieffians, by Quakers, by even longtime friends such as Gorham Munson. His diaries report he resented the fact that Gerald Heard and Paul Tillich, instead of Jean Toomer, had been asked to speak to the upcoming Conference of Religion and Psychology. This conference was an annual gathering, begun about ten years earlier by a group of Friends interested in Karl Jung’s psychology and held at Haverford College. Jean felt that he was the expert on the interplay of psychology and religion, and his first reaction to this imagined snub was an aggressive “I’ll show them all!” But in time reasoning and associations led him to the inner blockage which started his search 28 years earlier: “I cannot get what I want to have (what belongs to me) because I cannot give (fully) what I have to give.” He did have some awareness that something in him did not want him to physically and psychically well.
Between 1940 and 1950 Toomer continued to write poems, such as “The Promise,” “They Are Not Missed,” “To Gurdjieff Dying,” and “See the Heart,” but his writings more often shifted away from literary works to lectures, essays, and pamphlets on Quaker religious philosophy. Many of the essays, like “Santa Claus Will Not Bring Peace” (1943), “The Presence of Love” (1944), “Keep the Inward Watch” (1945), “Authority, Inner and Outer” (1947), and “Blessing and Curse” (1950), were published in the Quaker journal Friends Intelligencer.
After 1950 Toomer produced no literary works, as he began withdrawing from public life.
In 1952’s November, Marjorie and Jean made casual plans to go to New York for several days, visit friends and see a show. Fred Leighton, a student from the Chicago Gurdjieff group days, wrote that John G. Bennett, an Englishman who worked with Gurdjieff towards the end of the master’s life, was beginning a series of lectures the very night of the Toomer’s arrival. Toomer attended the first lecture and received an overwhelming impression of Bennett’s “inner freedom” and “quietly sustained feeling of joy” and “a level sensibly higher and much more stable than my own.” Next day, when Toomer, Fred Leighton, and Gorham Munson met for lunch with Bennett, Jean learned that Gurdjieff, seven years before his death, had begun in 1942 to develop some rather specific teachings in Paris and trained several people to transmit them. Jean was irresistibly drawn to catch up with what he had missed, to “be given another chance to be. To evolve. To become of use to myself and others.”
He began immediately, learning voraciously from Bennett for the two weeks before the latter returned to London. Under the leadership of Mme. Jeanne de Salzmann, to whom Gurdjieff had given the care of The Work, some sixty people of the hundreds who applied were selected to meet regularly and learn more about the system. Toomer was in a group lead directly by Mme. de Salzmann and then Louise Welch, when de Salzmann returned to Paris. Welch, who had worked with Orage and Gurdjieff, and with Ouspensky, and Mme. Ouspensky at their center in Mendham, New Jersey.
Though Jean Toomer’s health had often prevented him from attending nearby meetings of the Friends, he managed to travel to New York and Louise Welch’s Gurdjieff meetings every week, without missing a meeting for six months. Toomer’s work on combating mechanicalness in himself brought him by midsummer of 1953 to some real insights: that in his earlier teaching he had lacked inner strength, unity, dependability, and that he lacked genuine understanding, though sometimes, as if by accident, real teaching happened through him. “There was the real thing — and, there was the mere role. And back and forth I’d pass, from the sincere ability into the pretense… Back and forth, with my awareness too sluggish to detect change from one to the other, most often.”
To aid his insomnia, and problems with alcohol, Toomer learned a way to practice “deep relaxation” of the autonomic nervous system. When his health problems again began to sap his energy, he began, in December of 1953, to see Welch’s doctor husband (also in the Gurdjieff Work) who correctly diagnosed the problem and healed him.
What resulted from this remarkable re-beginning was, according to Louise Welch, a time when there was a real change in both Jean and Marjorie: “Marjorie looked like a young girl,” and both seemed young and happy after having regularly looking exhausted. It was at this time the Marjorie was invited to take part in Welch’s Princeton meetings, and, for the first time, Marjorie was willing to be in a Gurdjieff group.
Toomer resisted J. G. Bennett’s early urgings for him to lead Gurdjieff groups, and in the summer of 1954, he asked Mme. de Salzmann who agreed provided he only read: if anything more were to be done, he must ask someone else to help. From this, the seed of a group began meeting at Jean and Marjorie’s home, later with the help of Louise and William Welch. In time he was assigning exercises individually. However, in 1957 Jean became too ill and the Welches moved to New York City. Thus, the Princeton and Doylestown Gurdjieff groups ended.
As Toomer’s health continued downward, he pulled more inward. Even his notes and journals, extraordinarily prolific, dried up at this time. Toomer’s last literary effort (1953) was, at the request of William Welch, an account of his first visit to Fountainbleau. When, in 1958, John Bennett came to New York in order to lecture on a special method for only longtime Gurdjieff students, Toomer was too ill to attend. Reports on his final years claim an extreme negative personality was dominant.
Jean Toomer died on March 30, 1967, at the age of 72.
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While Toomer’s literary reputation derives almost exclusively from his lyrical novel Cane, his eminence is further enhanced by a growing body of canon-formation scholarship that provides new perspectives on a career spanning more than three decades. Evaluating his significance is no longer difficult or problematical. He remains an enduring figure in the history and development of both the American and the African-American literary traditions.
Toomer’s personal and literary archives, including several drafts of his autobiography, are located in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Beyond Cane, Toomer’s major published works are contained in Darwin Turner, ed., The Wayward and the Seeking (1980); Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer, eds., The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988); Rudolph Byrd, ed., Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms by Jean Toomer (1991); Frederik L. Rusch, ed., A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings (1993); and in numerous periodicals and little magazines such as Broom, Double Dealer, Liberator, Crisis, Modern Review, Chapbook, S4N, Nomad, Dial, Adelphi, Pagany, Pembroke Magazine, Little Review, Prairie, Dubuque Dial, Friends Intelligencer, and New Mexico Sentinel. The most comprehensive bibliographies are John M. Reilly, “Jean Toomer: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism,” in Resources for American Literary Study (1974), and Robert B. Jones, “Jean Toomer: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism, 1923-1993,” in Resources for American Literary Study (1994).
The standard biography of Toomer is Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (1987). The best collections of critical essays on Toomer are Frank Durham, ed., The Merrill Studies in Cane (1971); Darwin Turner, ed., Cane: An Authoritative Text, Background, Criticism (1988); Therman B. O’Daniel, Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation (1988); and Robert B. Jones, ed., Critical Essays on Jean Toomer (1994). Important essays also appear in two special issues dedicated to Toomer, BANG! 2, no. 2 (1972), published by the Special Collections Library at Fisk University, and CLA Journal 17 (June 1974). The most comprehensive literary and critical assessments are Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (1965); Darwin Turner, In a Minor Chord (1971); Brian Benson and Mabel Dillard, Jean Toomer (1980); Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist (1984); Bernard Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987); Rudolph P. Byrd, Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff (1990); and Robert B. Jones, Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought (1993).
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