Cane (20 page)

At the height of their friendship and doubtless appreciative of Toomer’s dedication of “Kabnis” to him, Frank shepherded the manuscript to Horace Liveright, the co-founder of Boni and Liveright Publishers along with Albert Boni. On January 2, 1923, Frank sent Toomer a telegram informing him that Liveright had accepted
Cane
for publication. With Liveright as his publisher, Toomer would make his literary debut in splendid modernist company: just a year before, Liveright had published T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land.
In years to come, they would publish the first books of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Dorothy Parker, and other bright stars in the firmament of American modernism.

In the months following Frank’s excellent news, Toomer made preparations for his departure from Washington to New York: “I saw that it was very important for me to be in New York.” He would never again live in his native Washington. For the last time, Toomer dutifully made arrangements for the care of his beloved grandmother, who spent her last years with her son Walter and his family. He then boarded a train to New York, and “thus ended the three-year period of death and birth in Washington.”
¹²⁷
Having left New York in the summer of 1920 as an aspiring, unpublished writer, Toomer returned to the nation’s literary capital in the summer of 1923 as a published, respected, and admired author through the sheer force of “will and sweat,” and through the support of McKay and especially Locke, though chiefly through the influence, counsel, and friendship of Frank.

In his recollection of this crucial period in his development as an artist, Toomer conveyed the excitement of his encounters with the major figures of white American modernism that summer: “In New York, I stepped into the literary world. Frank, Gorham Munson, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, Matthew Josephson, Mal-com Cowley, Paul Rosenfield, Van Wyck Brooks, Robert Littell—
Broom,
the
Dial,
the
New Republic
and many more. I lived on Gay Street and entered into the swing of it. It was an extraordinary summer…. I met and talked with Alfred Stieglitz and saw his photographs. I was invited here and there.”
¹²⁸
In this recollection, Toomer is describing his pleasure at being introduced into a world populated by the key writers of the Lost Generation and the small, but influential magazines through which they shaped the mainstream of American modernism.

The sometimes overlapping, sometimes separate, other world of writers who contributed to the shape and direction of Afro-American modernism included most influentially Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Sterling A. Brown, among two dozen others, coalescing around the slight, though formidable figure of Locke in his
pied-à-terre
in Harlem. But Toomer is largely silent about his encounters with them. These writers published in two magazines primarily:
Opportunity,
the monthly magazine of the Urban League, edited by the enterprising sociologist, Charles S. Johnson, who along with Locke, was one of the two midwives of the Harlem Renaissance; and in Du Bois’s
Crisis.
Locke’s
The New Negro
anthology, as we have seen, gave the nascent movement a form and a manifesto. A few other periodicals, such as
Fire,
the short-lived magazine founded by Hughes, Hurston, and Wallace Thurman, also played a role in shaping the course of the Renaissance, but none had the canonical presence of
Crisis
and
Opportunity.

Perhaps a sign of Toomer’s evolving thoughts about how he would identify himself racially, when he arrived in New York in that heady summer of 1923, is the fact that he did not seek lodging in Harlem but rather in Greenwich Village, sharing an apartment on Grove Street with Gorham Munson after the departure of his roommate Hart Crane. Munson’s hospitality prepared the ground for a lifelong friendship with Toomer. Sometime later, he moved to the black section of the Village, renting a “small row-house apartment on Gay Street…distinctive then as being a predominantly black settlement in an otherwise white part of town.” According to his biographers, “Toomer spent his days in the backyard reading or in the apartment writing. During that summer he was trying to establish himself as a free-lance writer for various New York journals and little magazines.”
¹²⁹
At the end of that summer, Toomer’s long-cherished dream of publishing a book—“I wanted a published book as I wanted nothing else”—became a reality. Liveright brought out
Cane
in September 1923.
¹³⁰
Much to Toomer’s delight, the reviews were uniformly positive. High praise came from the members of the two literary worlds who regarded him as a member. Comparing Toomer’s debut work with the Frank’s fiction, Robert Littell offered this assessment of
Cane
in the
New Republic
: “Toomer’s view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist—lyric, symbolic, oblique, seldom actual.”
¹³¹
Allen Tate, a member of the Fugitive Poets, also praised
Cane
in the pages of Nashville’s
Tennessean.
Countee Cullen sent Toomer a congratulatory note in which he described
Cane
as a “classical portrayal of things as they are.”
¹³²
A month after the publication of
Cane,
the critic Edward O’Brien wrote from England requesting permission to reprint “Blood-Burning Moon” in the anthology
The Best Short Stories of 1923.
¹³³
Du Bois and Locke expressed their admiration for Toomer’s achievement in an essay entitled “The Younger Literary Movement” in 1924 in
Crisis.
The influential African American critic William Stanley Braithwaite offered high praise of
Cane
in the pages of
The New Negro
: “
Cane
is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and fame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature.”
¹³⁴
Two years later in the summer of 1927, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston paid homage to Toomer’s artistic achievement by visiting Sparta, the inspiration for
Cane,
on their return North from a road trip through the South.
¹³⁵

Reflecting upon
Cane’
s reception and impact almost forty years after its publication, Arna Bontemps, a member of the younger generation of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, said this of Toomer’s shaping influence on the forms his black contemporaries and literary heirs would craft: “
Cane
’s influence was by no means limited to the joyous band that included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher and their contemporaries of the Twenties. Subsequent writing by Negroes in the United States, as well as in the West Indies and Africa, has continued to reflect its mood and often its method and, one feels, it has also influenced the writing about Negroes by others. Certainly, no earlier volume of poetry or fiction or both had come close to expressing the ethos of the Negro in the Southern setting as
Cane
did.”
¹³⁶
While acknowledging his broad influence, Darwin T. Turner maintained that Toomer’s signal contribution to American letters was to reverse years of stereotypical portrayals of rural, southern black language and life: “No matter how he influenced others, it cannot be denied that Jean Toomer was the first writer of the twenties to delineate southern black peasant life perceptively.”
¹³⁷

Toomer’s deft portrayal of southern black peasantry, his sensitive portrayal of black women, his power as a lyric poet, the manner in which he combined philosophy with fiction, and his exploration of the relationship between region and race directly influenced the shape of Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, and through her, the theme of Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man.
What’s more,
Cane
has profoundly influenced both the fictions and the poetry of key African American writers who came of age since its republication in the late 1960s, including Alice Walker, Michael S. Harper, Rita Dove, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, Elizabeth Alexander, and Natasha Trethewey. Though Ernest J. Gaines discovered
Cane
after he had developed his particular style of writing, he regards Toomer as a fellow artist with whom he shares a commitment to portray realistically the experiences of southern black farmers. Despite his desire to fee it, Toomer’s literary legacy survives primarily because of
Cane’
s canonization in the black literary tradition.

While
Cane
was clearly an artistic success, sales were disappointing. It sold only one thousand copies, but it was printed in a second edition. As Toomer himself remarked: “The reviews were splendid. It didn’t sell well, but it made its literary mark—that was all I asked.”
¹³⁸
The strength of the reviews was doubtless a factor in Liveright’s decision to reissue the second, smaller edition in 1927. While scholars would continue to praise
Cane
, it would remain out of print until the appearance of the third edition in 1967, followed by editions in 1969 and 1975. Doubtless, the renewed interest in the Harlem Renaissance by the writers of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, the institutionalization of the field of African American Studies in 1969, and the dramatic growth of African American literary studies through the 1980s led to the first Norton Critical Edition in 1988, splendidly edited by Darwin T. Turner.

Though
Cane
had “made its literary mark,” Toomer’s relationship to the book he so much desired to be published began to shift as early as the fall of 1923. This shift, which would eventually result in his rejection of the book he once regarded as the “passport” that “would lead [him] from the cramped conditions of Washington which [he] had outgrown, into the world of writers and literature,” would be catalyzed by his friend Waldo Frank and his publisher, George Liveright,
¹³⁹
involving the launch of
Cane
itself and the efforts by Liveright to promote it. Frank had written, by all accounts, a beautiful foreword to
Cane.
He lavished praise upon his friend and protégé’s debut book: “A poet has arisen among our American youth who has known how to turn the essences and materials of his Southland into the essences and materials of literature.”
¹⁴⁰
Quite perceptively, the ever-supportive Frank described
Cane
as “an aesthetic equivalent of the land.” So far, so good.

However, the language that disturbed Toomer, was this: “A poet has arisen in that land who writes, not as a Southerner, not as a rebel against Southerners, not as a Negro, not apologist or priest or critic: who writes as a
poet.
”
¹⁴¹
Moreover Frank’s references to Toomer as “the gifted Negro” and “an American Negro” inadvertently only made matters worse so far as Toomer was concerned, undermining his desire to position himself publicly as a writer “neither white nor black.” Frank’s straightforward description of Toomer as a Negro, notwithstanding Toomer’s belabored efforts to explain his racial sense of himself to his friend privately, felt first like disappointment, and then betrayal: “One day in the mail his [Frank’s] preface [
sic
] to my book came. I read it and had as many mixed feelings as I have ever had. On the one hand, it was a tribute and a send-of as only Waldo Frank could have written it, and my gratitude for his having gotten the book accepted rose to the surface and increased my gratitude for the present piece of work in so far as it affirmed me as a literary artist of great promise. On the other hand, in so far as the racial thing went, it was evasive, or, in any case, indefinite.”
¹⁴²

For reasons that are not clear to us, Toomer obsessed and fretted about Frank’s references to his race in the foreword, as if Frank had either invented his black ancestry or publicly unmasked him as a Negro writer, leading him inevitably to question Frank’s motives: “Well, I asked myself, why should the reader know? Why should any such thing be incorporated in a foreword to
this
book? Why should Waldo Frank or any other be my spokesman in this matter? All of this was true enough, and I was more or less reconciled to let the preface [
sic
] stand as it was, inasmuch as it was so splendid that I could not take issue with it on this, after all, minor point, inasmuch as my need to have the book published was so great, but my suspicions as to Waldo Frank’s lack of understanding of, or failure to accept, my actuality became active again.”
¹⁴³
Toomer would also claim that he learned from mutual friends that it was Frank who had constructed a portrait of him as a Negro in the literary circles of New York, a portrait that, he felt, misrepresented the “actuality” of his race, or his racelessness. Toomer, no doubt unfairly given his extensive contacts with other black writers in Washington and New York and his grandfather’s historical status as the highest ranking black elected official in the whole of Reconstruction, claimed to believe that it was “through Frank’s agency that an erroneous picture of me was put in the minds of certain people in New York before my book came out. Thus was started a misunderstanding in the very world, namely the literary art world, in which I expected to be really understood. I knew none of this at the time….”
¹⁴⁴
While Kerman and Eldridge write that Toomer and Margaret Naumburg, Frank’s wife, “were entranced with each other from the first time they met,” the unhappy poet of
Cane
may have ended his friendship with Frank by seeking his revenge, in part, by seducing his mentor’s wife.
¹⁴⁵