The use of binary oppositions has a long history in African American literature, going back at least to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Du Bois transformed these in The Souls of Black Folk into the duality of the Negro citizen, a necessary and problematic by-product of anti-black racism and segregation. Toomer, however, takes Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, and boldly declares that this fragmentation is, ultimately, the sign of the Negro’s modernity, first, and that the Negro, therefore, is America’s harbinger of and metaphor for modernity itself. It is a stunningly brilliant claim, this rendering by Toomer of the American Negro as the First Modern Person. There is no end to the manifestations of fragmentation in Cane and no false gestures to the unity of opposites at the text’s end. No, in Cane, fragmentation is here to stay, for such is the stuff of modern life. When Kabnis ascends the stairs from his encounter with Father John in the basement at the end of the text, he carries a bucket of dead coals, undermining what would be the false nod to hope through reconciliation possibly suggested by the text’s image of a rising sun. Zora Neale Hurston revises this very scene at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God, having depicted her protagonist’s coming to voice not as the result of reconciling binaries, but of developing the capacity to negotiate back and forth between them, acutely mindful of the fragmentation that Toomer defined as the necessary precondition for finding one’s identity, an identity always split, or doubled, or divided. In Cane, Jean Toomer became a lyrical prophet of modernism. And then, abruptly, he decided to pursue other passages.
In January 1924, Toomer marked his passing from “external, visible reality” to “internal, invisible reality” by attending lectures by Gurdjief and demonstrations of his method at Manhattan’s Leslie Hall and the Neighborhood Playhouse. He writes about how deeply moved he was by his first encounter with Gurdjief’s teachings. Gurdjief claimed that human beings are mechanical beings, and that they lack unity, and thus true consciousness. In the Gurdjief system there are four levels of consciousness: the sleeping state, waking consciousness, self-consciousness, and objective or cosmic consciousness. Advanced levels of consciousness can only be attained through the practice of such exercises as self-remembering or self-observation as well as non-identification. Practiced in one’s daily life, these exercises possessed the potential to liberate one from mechanical modes of thought and behavior, and to move one toward the attainment of higher levels of consciousness.
Toomer, to say the least, was captivated by the promise of Gurdjief’s teachings. By the summer of 1924 he had left New York to study at Gurdjief’s institute in France. Put another way, in less than a year after the publication of Cane and when the Harlem Renaissance and other expressions of high cultural modernism were approaching their apex, Toomer had passed into a vastly different cultural orbit. When he returned to New York in early 1925, he set about in almost priestly fashion to promote the Gurdjief method through public lectures. It was as a Gurdjief lecturer that Hughes and Hurston first met Toomer in Harlem in 1925.
Neither as a writer nor as a lecturer did Toomer earn an income substantial enough to support himself. Like his father Nathan Toomer, he was fortunate that he married well. In 1931, Toomer married the writer Margery Latimer, who died in 1932 after giving birth to their daughter, Margery Toomer. Two years later, Toomer married Marjorie Content, the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, and the former wife of Harold Loeb, the founder of the magazine Broom. Marjorie Content and Toomer came close to meeting one another in 1923 at her East Ninth Street townhouse, in the basement of which were the offices of Broom. Lola Ridge attempted to introduce Content to Toomer, whose work she admired, but she shyly demurred. Toomer married her in Taos, New Mexico, on September 1, 1934, with his former lover Georgia O’Keefe in attendance as witness. He would be her fourth and last husband.
Prior to his marriage to Content, however, Toomer had developed a reputation as the inamorato of two of the women who played central roles in the cultural world of American modernism. Its center of gravity shifted between Seven Arts, presided over to a very large degree by Waldo Frank, and the Photo-Secession Group, perhaps an even more exalted stratum of the arts, whose headquarters was Manhattan’s 291 Gallery, of which the photographer Alfred Stieglitz was the imperious head. Shortly after the publication of Cane in the fall of 1923, Toomer had an affair with Margaret Naumburg, an educator who also happened to be Waldo Frank’s wife, which not surprisingly led to the dissolution of their friendship.152 Sometime later in 1933, Toomer also had an affair with the artist Georgia O’Keefe during one of his visits to The Hill, Stieglitz and O’Keefe’s retreat on Lake George, New York.153 Toomer was extraordinarily handsome and beguiling, and no doubt cut a striking figure, often finding himself one of the very few swarthy men in the inner sanctums of white American modernism.
As a result of his marriage to Marjorie Content, Toomer could continue with his work as a Gurdjief lecturer without fear of impoverishment. He would lecture on the Gurdjief method most intensely for the next two decades, not only in New York but in Chicago; Portage, Wisconsin; Taos, New Mexico; and Doylestown, Pennsylvania, his final home. Toomer continued to write novels, short stories, plays, aphorisms, and poems, but most of these bear the unmistakable imprint of Gurdjief’s philosophy and teachings, stimuli not nearly as fecund as the rural Georgian landscape. Except for autobiographical excerpts edited by Darwin T. Turner, including the poem “The Blue Meridian,” and Essentials, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, a collection of aphorisms, Toomer’s post-Cane writings remain largely unpublished. Lacking Cane’s lyrical originality, Toomer’s philosophical and psychological writings often read like sophomoric, prosaic, bloodless translations of Gurdjief’s philosophy and method.
As Toomer passed into Gurdjief’s world, he passed into literary obscurity. While his search for enlightenment or the “intelligible scheme” took him to India, through Jungian analysis, and to his conversion to the Society of Friends, Toomer’s commitment to Gurdjief, while fluctuating in its intensity, nevertheless remained the organizing principle of his life. He recommitted himself to this work in 1953, and remained a disciple until he passed away on March 30, 1967—the year in which the third edition of Cane was published.
Jean Toomer’s Racial Self-Identifcation:
A Note on the Newly Found Documents
Of course, we are still confronted with the vital question that has arisen in various ways throughout this introduction: Was Jean Toomer a Negro who passed for white?
Thanks to pioneering research conducted at the editors’ request by the genealogist Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, we can now understand more fully than ever before Jean Toomer’s conflicted thinking about his racial identification, as he expressed them in public documents, including the federal census, two draft registrations, and on his marriage license to Margery Latimer. In addition, we also now know how Toomer’s grandfather and grandmother, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback and Nina Emily Hethorn, his mother, Nina Pinchback, and his father, Nathan Toomer, are all identified in federal census records.