Virtuoso, mystic, and modernist author of the first mature work of the post–World War I Southern Renaissance, Nathan Eugene “Jean” Toomer was an alienated seeker, a forerunner of the racial neutrality of 1990s multiculturalism. A steadfast humanist, he was uncertain of his ethnic makeup yet identified solidly with black themes. He once said, “I am of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at large in the human world, preparing a new race.” A metrical whiz, he assimilated social themes into a varied canon; like his friends, poets Langston Hughes and Hart Crane, he attempted to transform jazz into verse. Along with Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, publication of Toomer’s creative montage Cane (1923) was a defining moment in Harlem’s era of artistic experimentation.
Toomer was born on December 26, 1894, in Washington, D.C. Following his parents’ divorce, he faced social and financial ruin after his mother married an irresponsible man and settled in New Rochelle, New York. At her death in 1909, he moved in with his grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, son of a slave woman and a Louisiana lieutenant governor during Reconstruct-ion. He enrolled at six institutions and studied law at the University of Wisconsin and history at City College of New York but gave up on scholastics and returned to Washington to manage the Howard Theater. In 1922, he took his first job in education, a four-month stint as principal of an agricultural and industrial academy in Sparta, Georgia. The experience—his only direct contact with the South—generated a rhapsodic love of Negro spirituals and folklore.
Toomer was influenced by poets William Blake and Walt Whitman and the artistic genius of novelist James Joyce. He associated with other black writers at the stylish salons hosted by Ethel Ray Nance and Georgia Douglas Johnson. The support of editor Jessie Redmon Fauset encouraged Toomer to publish poems, excerpts, sketches of Southern life, and short fiction. His stark picture of Southern segregation powered Cane, an experimental three-part study of black identity and citizenship in the United States. The work, set in Georgia, enlarges on Afro-centrism and prefigures the vast black migration to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other northeastern urban centers and the “black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The mixed-genre text contains verse, sketches, commentary, and drama. Its inventiveness earned him a place at the Harlem symposium of young artists in March 1924, when he, Langston Hughes, and Countée Cullen received accolades from W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke, the revered elder statesmen of the Harlem Renaissance.
In 1923, the Howard University Players performed Toomer’s poorly conceived play, Balo, A Sketch of Negro Life, a study of black Georgian peasant life. That same year, he failed to find a producer for Kabnis (1923), a modern drama based on his experiences while teaching in Georgia. Restless and dissatisfied, he moved from New York to Chicago and then to France. In Fontainebleau, France, he came under the influence of Russian mystic Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, a utopist gathering intent on founding an ideal society based on mutual understanding. After returning to the United States, Toomer lost his readership while sponsoring a Gurdjieff colony on Chicago’s Gold Coast.
Toomer’s on-again, off-again literary drive bemused his circle. They questioned why he seldom published and how he could afford to reject James Weldon Johnson’s offer to publish his poems in Book of American Negro Poetry, which Toomer disdained because of its insistence on blacks only. Although Toomer persevered with a wealth of writing, including poems, novels, nonfiction, and short fiction, his career stalled. He produced only two works, the self-published book of sayings, Essentials (1931), influenced by Pennsylvania Quakers, and Portage Potential (1932). He went into a depression after his wife, novelist Marjorie Latimer, died giving birth to a daughter in August 1932. The publication of a rhapsodic long narrative poem, The Blue Meridian (1936), ended his role in the Harlem Renaissance.
At loose ends, Toomer was an artistic dropout turned Quaker. He withdrew into religious mysticism; his work passed out of print. He died on March 30, 1967, at a rest home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, leaving unpublished a sizable sheaf of stories, drama, novels, and an autobiography. In 1974, Darwin Turner issued The Wayward and the Seeking: a Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Editors Robert B. Jones and the poet’s second wife produced a subsequent verse anthology, The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988). The boldness of Toomer’s racial neutrality influenced subsequent students of the black experience, notably novelist Alice Walker.
