Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer | |
---|---|
Born | Nathan Pinchback Toomer December 26, 1894 Washington, D.C., United States |
Died | March 30, 1967 Doylestown, Pennsylvania, United States | (aged 72)
Occupation | Poet, novelist |
Literary movement | Modernism |
Notable works | Cane (1923) |
Spouse | |
Children | 1 |
Signature | |
Jean Toomer (born Nathan Pinchback Toomer; December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist commonly associated with the
Toomer continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. His first wife died soon after the birth of their daughter. After he married again in 1934, Toomer moved with his family from New York to
Ancestry
Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in
His father was married three times. His first marriage produced four daughters. After the death of his first wife, Nathan Sr. married Amanda America Dickson, a former enslaved woman of mixed race whose inheritance from her white father resulted in great wealth. She was called the "wealthiest colored woman in America."[5] She died intestate in 1893 after about a year of marriage. A legal struggle with her children, which did not end until years after his third marriage, left the senior Nathan with little to no inheritance.[5][4]
In 1893, the now 54-year-old widower married 28-year-old Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, another wealthy young woman of color. She was born in New Orleans as the third child of Nina Emily Hawthorne and politician P. B. S. Pinchback, both of mixed heritage. Her father was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but he ultimately acquiesced.[5] Born from this union and named "Nathan" after his father, Toomer would later use "Jean" as his first name at the start his literary career.
Early life
Toomer's father soon abandoned his wife and his young son, returning to Georgia seeking to obtain a portion of his late second wife's estate. Nina divorced him and took back her
As a child in Washington D.C., Toomer attended segregated Black schools. After his mother remarried, they moved to suburban New Rochelle, New York and the youth began to attend an all-white school. Toomer returned to D.C. after his mother's death in 1909, when he was 15, and lived with his maternal grandparents. He graduated from the M Street High School, a prestigious academic Black high school in the city with a national reputation.[7]
Toomer was enumerated as "Eugene P." Toomer on the 1900 U.S. Census, living with his mother in the household of his grandparents, Pinkney and Nina E. Pinchback. Everyone in the household was recorded as Black. Eugene lived with his grandparents in 1910 as well, at which time his race was recorded as mulatto. When he registered for the World War I draft in 1917, he styled his name Eugene Pinchback Toomer, and he was identified as Black by the draft board. "Jean" Toomer lived in Manhattan, New York, in 1920 and 1930 and his race was recorded as White by the census enumerators. "Nathan" is also recorded as White on the 1940 US Census. When "Jean" registered for the World War II draft in 1942, he was identified as Negro. "Nathan" Toomer's 1967 death certificate also records his race as white.
Education
Between 1914 and 1917, Jean attended six institutions of higher education (the
Career
After leaving college, Toomer returned to Washington, DC. He published some short stories and continued writing during the volatile social period following
Toomer devoted eight months to the study of Eastern philosophies and continued to be interested in this subject.
By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classifications, wanting to be identified only as an American.[7][8] He gained experience in both white and "colored" societies, and resisted being classified as a Negro writer. He grudgingly allowed his publisher of Cane to use that term to increase sales, as there was considerable interest in new Negro writers.[12]
As Richard Eldridge has noted, Toomer "sought to transcend standard definitions of race. I think he never claimed that he was a white man. He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life."[13] William Andrews has noted he "was one of the first writers to move beyond the idea that any black ancestry makes you black."[13]
In 1921 Toomer took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural agricultural and
Several
By Toomer's time, the state was suffering labor shortages due to thousands of rural Blacks leaving in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. Planters feared losing their pool of cheap labor. Trying to control their movement, the legislature passed laws to prevent outmigration. It also established high license fees for Northern employers recruiting labor in the state. This was a formative period for Toomer; he started writing about it while still in Georgia and, while living in Hancock County, submitted the long story "Georgia Night" to the socialist magazine The Liberator in New York.[9][7]
Toomer returned to New York, where he became friends with Waldo Frank. They had an intense friendship through 1923, and Frank served as his mentor and editor on his novel Cane.[10] The two men came to have strong differences.[14]
Cane
During Toomer's time as principal of Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia, he wrote stories, sketches, and poems drawn from his experience there. These formed the basis for Cane, his
Cane is structured in three parts. The first third of the book is devoted to the Black experience in the Southern farmland. The second part of Cane is more urban and concerned with Northern life. The conclusion of the work is a prose piece entitled "Kabnis." People would call Toomer's Cane a
The book was reissued in 1969, two years after Toomer's death. Cane has been assessed since the late 20th century as also an "analysis of class and caste", with "secrecy and
Many scholars have considered Cane to be Toomer's best work.[16] Cane was hailed by critics and has been considered as an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism. However, as previously stated, Toomer resisted racial classification and did not want to be marketed as a "Negro" writer. As he wrote to his publisher Horace Liveright, "My racial composition and my position in the world are realities that I alone may determine."[17] Toomer found it more difficult to get published throughout the 1930s, the period of the Great Depression, as did many authors.
Later work
Toomer continued with his spiritual exploration by traveling to India in 1939. Later he studied the psychology developed by Carl Jung, the mystic Edgar Cayce, and the Church of Scientology, but reverted to Gurdjieff's philosophy.[20]
Toomer wrote a small amount of fiction in this later period. Mostly he published essays in Quaker publications during these years. He devoted most of his time to serving on Quaker committees for community service and working with high school students.[21]
His last literary work published during his lifetime was Blue Meridian, a long poem extolling, "the potential of the American race".[21] He stopped writing for publication after 1950. He continued to write privately, however, including several autobiographies and a poetry volume titled, The Wayward and the Seeking.[22] He died in 1967 after several years of poor health.[8]
Marriage and family
In 1931 Toomer married writer Margery Latimer in Wisconsin. While traveling on the West Coast, their union was covered in sensational terms by a Hearst reporter. An anti-miscegenation scandal broke, incorporating rumors about the commune they had organized earlier that year in Portage, Wisconsin. West Coast and Midwest press outlets were aroused and Time magazine sent a reporter to interview them. Toomer was criticized violently by some for marrying a white woman.[23][24]
Latimer was a respected young writer known for her first two novels and short stories. Diagnosed with a heart leak, she suffered a hemorrhage and died during childbirth in August 1932, when their first child was born. Toomer named their only daughter Margery in his wife's memory.
In 1934 the widower Toomer married a second time, to Marjorie Content, a New York photographer. She was the daughter of Harry and Ada Content, a wealthy German-Jewish family. Her father was a successful stockbroker.[25]
Marjorie Content had been married and divorced three times. Because Toomer was a noted writer and Content was white, this marriage also attracted notice. In 1940 the Toomers moved to
In 1939 Toomer changed his name again, using "Nathan Jean Toomer", to emphasize that he was male. He may also have been reaching toward his paternal ancestry by this action. He usually signed his name N. Jean Toomer, and continued to be called "Jean" by friends.[11]
Racial identity
Like some others of
"I [he] wrote a poem called, "The First American," the idea of which was, that here in America we are in [the] process of forming a new race, that I [he] was one of the first conscious members of this race."[27][28]
He resisted being classified as a "Negro writer", but his most enduring work, Cane was inspired by his time in the rural, African American, South, being an imaginative exploration of the African-American world inspired by that heritage. This, itself, may have been part of the issue when it came to his identity - as Larson puts it: "In Cane, Toomer had reached out and attempted to embrace his darkness, but what he had caught within his arms was the fear that if he continued to identify himself as a black man his life would always bear the stigma of restriction. Instead of expanding his perspective, blackness, he feared, would limit it. He had glimpsed the marketplace for the black writer and, in Nellie Y. McKay's words, realized that "it was offered to him on the basis of his 'Negro' blood." What he wanted was something larger, bigger, wider: completeness."[27]
In preparing a new edition of that work, scholars
Toomer's ambivalence toward racial identification corresponds to his interest in Quaker philosophy. In his early twenties, he attended meetings of the Religious Society of Friends in Doylestown, a Quaker group.[30] Later he joined a meeting group there.
Quakerism connects groups of different believers under the respect for everyone's belief of a creed. They encourage each other to be able to understand themselves and their own personalities. Jean Toomer's Quaker belief connects to his writings on the place of the African-American in the 20th century.[31] He also wrote essays on George Fox and Quakerism. In his essay, “The Negro Emergent,” Toomer describes how African-Americans were able to rise from those past identifications when they were portrayed only as slaves. He said they were working to find a voice for themselves.[32]
Legacy and archives
- Toomer's papers and unpublished manuscripts are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University.[8]
- When Cane was reprinted in 1969, it was favorably reviewed as a "Black Classic", leading to a revival of interest in Toomer's work.[9]
- Since the late 20th century, collections of Toomer's poetry and essays have been published, and his Essentials was republished, originally self-published in 1931. It included "Gurdjieffian aphorisms".[21]
- In 2002, Toomer was elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.[21]
Books by Toomer
- ISBN 0-87140-151-7
- Problems of Civilization, by Ellsworth Huntington, Whiting Williams, Jean Toomer and others, (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1929)
- Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1931)
- An Interpretation of Friends Worship (Philadelphia: Committee on Religious Education of Friends General Conference, 1947)
- The Flavor of Man (Philadelphia: Young Friends Movement of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1949)
- The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, edited by Darwin T. Turner (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1980) ISBN 9780882580142
- The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) ISBN 0-8078-4209-5
- The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919–1924, University of Tennessee Press, 2006
See also
- List of African American writers
- Literature of Georgia (U.S. state)
References
- ^ Sehgal, Parul (December 25, 2018). "A Century Later, a Novel by an Enigma of the Harlem Renaissance Is Still Relevant". The New York Times. Retrieved January 1, 2019.
- ^ Cynthia Earl Kerman. "The Lives of Jean Toomer : A Hunger for Wholeness". Lsupress.org. Retrieved October 28, 2021.
- ^ Leslie, Kent; NGE Staff. "Amanda America Dickson (1849-1893)". New Georgia Encyclopedia. Retrieved 25 August 2021.
- ^ a b Kent Anderson Leslie, "Amanda America Dickson, (1849–1893)", History and Archaeology, New Georgia Encyclopedia, 2003/2013
- ^ a b c d e Kent Anderson Leslie and Willard B. Gatewood Jr. "'This Father of Mine ... a Sort of Mystery': Jean Toomer's Georgia Heritage", Georgia Historical Quarterly 77 (winter 1993)
- ^ Cynthia Earl Kerman, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness, LSU Press, 1989, p. 29
- ^ a b c "Jean Toomer", Poets.org, accessed 27 Dec 2010
- ^ a b c d e f Jones, Robert B. "Jean Toomer's Life and Career". Modern American Poetry. Urbana-Champaign, Illinois: Department of English, University of Illinois. Retrieved 29 May 2012.
- ^ a b c d Charles Scruggs, Lee VanDeMarr, Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, "Introduction", accessed 15 January 2011
- ^ a b c Charles Scruggs, Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance - book review Archived 2008-05-14 at the Wayback Machine, African American Review, Spring, 2002, accessed 15 January 2011
- ^ a b Kerman (1989), The Lives of Jean Toomer, p. 29
- ^ "Introduction," The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919–1924, University of Tennessee Press, 2006
- ^ a b c d e f FELICIA R. LEE, "Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White", New York Times, 26 December 2010, accessed 27 March 2014
- ^ Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, Edited by Kathleen Pfeiffer, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010
- ^ "Jean Toomer". Poetry Foundation. 2024-02-02. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
- ^ Foundation, Poetry (28 October 2021). "Jean Toomer". Poetryfoundation.org. Retrieved 28 October 2021.
- ^ Harmon, Charles. " 'Cane,' Race, and 'Neither/Norism'", Southern Literary Journal, 2000 Spring; 32(2): 90–101, accessed 15 January 2011.
- ^ "The Big Sea by Langston Hughes". Gutenberg.ca.
- ^ "In Harmony With the Music of Gurdjieff". Washingtonpost.com.
- ^ "Jean Toomer Biography". Biography.com. A&E Television Networks. Retrieved February 23, 2016.
- ^ a b c d Keith Hulett, "Jean Toomer", New Georgia Encyclopedia Library, accessed 8 February 2011
- JSTOR 27555288.
- ^ "Races: Just Americans". Time. Vol. 19, no. 13. March 28, 1932. p. 21.
- ^ Anastasia Carol Curwood, Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars, University of North Carolina Press, 2010, p. 75
- ^ a b Curwood (2010), Stormy Weather, pp. 74–79
- ^ Salinas, Andrew (July 27, 1969). "Gorham B. Munson oral history interview on Jean Toomer, 1969 | Amistad Research Center". Tulane University. Retrieved August 20, 2018.
- ^ ISBN 087745437X.
- ^ "Jean Toomer: The Fluidity of Racial Identity". Smithsonian - National Portrait Gallery. Smithsonian. 20 July 2012. Retrieved March 26, 2023.
- ^ "A new look at the life of Jean Toomer" NPR, (Robert Siegel and Professor Byrd), 30 December 2010. (Transcript and audio, 5 mins)
- ^ Jones, Robert B. (1999). "Jean Toomer's Life and Career". Modern American Poetry. American National Biography. Retrieved August 20, 2018.
- ^ "What Do Quakers Believe?". Quaker Information Center. May 26, 2011. Retrieved August 19, 2018.
- )
Further reading
- Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, Edited by Kathleen Pfeiffer, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010
- Barbara Foley, "'In the Land of Cotton': Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer's Cane," African American Review 32 (summer 1998).
- Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Sparta," American Literature 67 (December 1995).
- Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, editors Michael Feith and Genevieve Fabre. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-8135-2846-1
- Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), online at Googlebooks.
- Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
- Donald A. Petesch, A Spy in the Enemy's Country: The Emergence of Modern Black Literature (Google eBook), University of Iowa Press, 1989
- Turner, Darwin T. "Introduction," Cane by Jean Toomer (New York: Liveright, 1993). ix–xxv. ISBN 0-87140-151-7.
- Hans Ostrom, "Jean Toomer" (poem), in The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976–2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2006, p. 17.) First published in Xavier Review 23, no. 2 (Fall 2003).
External links
- Digital collections
- Works by Jean Toomer in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
- Works by Jean Toomer at Project Gutenberg
- Works by Jean Toomer at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Profiles
- Poetry Foundation profile
- "Jean Toomer", Jean Toomer Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University
- "Jean Toomer", Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, University of Georgia
- Charles Scruggs, "Jean Toomer" Archived 2005-03-30 at the Wayback Machine, Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
- Jean Toomer: Profile and Poems at Poets.org
- Reviews and scholarship
- Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Washington and the Politics of Class: From 'Blue Veins' to Seventh-Street Rebels", Modern Fiction Studies 42 (Summer 1996), 289–321.
- Robert B. Jones, "Jean Toomer's Life and Career", From American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.
- Dan Schneider, "Book Review: 'Cane'", Hackwriters, May 2006.
- Felicia R. Lee, "Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White", New York Times, 26 December 2010.
- "A new look at the life of Jean Toomer" NPR, (Robert Siegel and Professor Byrd), 30 December 2010. (Transcript and audio, 5 mins)