It should not surprise us, then, that Alain Locke’s decision to reprint excerpts from Cane in The New Negro without Toomer’s permission just about drove Toomer to distraction: “But when Locke’s book, The New Negro, came out, there was the [Winold] Reiss portrait, and there was a story from Cane[Locke reprinted the stories “Carma” and “Fern,” as well as the poems “Georgia Dusk” and “Song of the Son”], and there in the introduction, were words about me which have caused as much or more misunderstanding than Waldo Frank’s.”148 Toomer felt betrayed by the two major figures at the center of the literary worlds that claimed him, and by both he felt completely misunderstood. But between the two, Toomer reserved his greater scorn for Locke: “However, there was and is, among others, this great difference between Frank and Locke. Frank helped me at a time when I most needed help. I will never forget it. Locke tricked and misused me.”149 Toomer seriously considered contesting Locke’s representation of him as a black writer, ultimately deciding against doing so because he was convinced that he probably could never correct the record, and fearing that his efforts at any sort of clarification would only contribute to the confusion. So Jean Toomer — despite his vehement objections — came to be known as a black writer through Cane, the book that ironically brought him the fame and acceptance in the literary world he had been seeking for so long.
Toomer’s decision, just a few months after Cane’ s publication, to become a student of Georges I. Gurdjief, the Russian mystic and psychologist, and originator of the Gurdjief system or method, also contributed to his estrangement from the book. Throughout much of his adult life, Toomer had been in search of what he called an “intelligible scheme, a sort of whole into which everything ft,” and toward the end of 1923 he believed he had at last found this grand and unifying pattern in Gurdjief’s teachings. Toomer’s introduction to Gurdjief’s philosphy came through P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, which he read in December 1923. Ouspensky’s writings were the object of some fascination among the members of his literary community in Greenwich Village, particularly to Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, and Waldo Frank. After reading Ouspensky, Toomer acquired a pamphlet describing the history and mission of Gurdjief’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France. “In it I found expressed,” he wrote, “more completely and with more authority than with anything possible from me, just the conditions of man which I myself realized. Moreover, a method, a means of doing something about it was promised. It was no wonder that I went heart and soul into the Gurdjief work.” 150
It should be emphasized that in Cane we find ample evidence of an orientation toward spiritual and philosophical concerns that would assume a larger, more marked significance in Toomer’s later writings. These concerns help to explain why he went “heart and soul into the Gurdjief work.” Even in his 1923 letter to Frank, Toomer had written of what he called the “spiritual entity behind the work.” A few years before his introduction to Gurdjief’s theories, Toomer, an autodidact who early on saw himself as a philosopher-poet, found as his great theme modernity’s attendant fragmentation and alienation. Cane is his most successful treatment of this theme, as it juxtaposes fragmentation with intense spirituality. Kerman and Eldridge describe the “spiritual entity” in the writing and in the writer thusly: “While others may have read Cane to see how a man could ft his human view into his blackness, Jean was trying to ft the blackness that was a part of him into a more comprehensive human view. Nor was he trying to ‘pass’ in a racial sense; rather, he was passing from preoccupations with external, visible reality to concentration on internal, invisible reality.”151 Perhaps. But Toomer did find a most original and compelling way to render the relation among fragmentation, alienation, and spirituality in the tripartite, lyrical form of Cane.
In fact, the grand achievement of Toomer is this: Cane is, perhaps, the first work of fiction by a black writer to take the historical experiences and social conditions of the Negro, and make them the metaphor for the human condition, in this case, the metaphor for modernity itself. Du Bois had, famously and brilliantly, redefined the concept of “double consciousness” as a metaphor for the Negro’s duality, a duality created by racial segregation. For Du Bois, double consciousness was a malady, a malady that could be cured only by the end of segregation. For Toomer, however, fragmentation, or duality, is the very condition of modernity. It cannot be “cured,” any more than the gap between the conscious mind and the unconscious can be obliterated. Cane is a book about nothing if not fragmentation; it is a book about dualities, unreconciled dualities, and this theme is repeated in each of its sections, whether in the South or the North, whether in the country or the city, whether in the book’s black characters or its white characters. Everybody and everything is hopelessly, inescapably fragmented. And nowhere is this better expressed than in the “Kabnis” section of Cane, in this exchange between Lewis and Kabnis, each other’s alter egos, through Lewis’s list of binaries:
Kabnis:…My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods.
Lewis: And black.
Kabnis: Aint much difference between blue and black.
Lewis: Enough to draw a denial from you. Cant hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, fame of the great season’s multi-colored leaves, tarnished, burned. Split, shredded; easily burned. No use…