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Article Excerpt
Taos is an end-product. It is the end of the slope. It is an end-product of the Indians, an end-product of the Spaniards, an end-product of the Yankees and puritans. It must be plowed under. Out of the fertility which death makes in the soil, a new people with a new form may grow. I dedicate myself to the swift death of the old, to the whole birth of the new. In whatever place I start work, I will call that place Taos.
--Jean Toomer, "A Drama of the Southwest (Notes)" (n.d., c. 1935) (1)
A photograph of Jean Toomer taken by his second wife, Marjorie Content, shows him posed at a table with his typewriter before him, replete with a sheet of paper. (2) Content was a noted photographer and this portrait has the posed look of a book jacket. Its composition seems highly constructed: the ream of paper next to the typewriter and the books on the shelf in the background are perfectly placed. The writer is artfully posed with his hand under his chin, as if thoughtfully contemplating his work. Words are barely visible on the sheet of paper exiting Toomer's typewriter; the distance from which this portrait has been taken has obscured them. They appear faint, apparitional, and illegible. The year is 1935, more than a decade after the publication of Cane (1923). While this image might be read as contrived, as little more than a fantasy of authorship for a writer who, according to most critical accounts, had already "failed" by this date, the possibility of this photograph as documentary evidence remains. After all, this is the same year that Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr suggest that Toomer's writing reengaged with "a radical analysis of the politics of his time," although "not ... an open discussion of racial matters" (219).
Like Content's photograph, scholarship on Toomer has continued to represent dichotomously the writer best known for Cane. In effect, critics and biographers have created two Jean Toomers. One is the writer of Cane, often considered the signal text of the Harlem Renaissance. He is politically engaged, interested in race, and aesthetically experimental. This Toomer looks back to the Southern past and slavery, and views black folk as sources for emergent, modernist, New Negro sensibilities. The other Toomer is post-Cane and is not a poet, but a psychologist, philosopher, or spiritual guru. This second Toomer disconnects himself from the New York literary scene of Waldo Frank, Broom, or Harlem. He denounces his black heritage, marries white women, and becomes little more than a literary mouthpiece for his spiritual mentor, George Gurdjieff. The promise of Toomer's early experimental writing is thus diminished and he is characterized as never again achieving the "literary merit" of Cane. Charles R. Larson, for example, wonders "why Jean Toomer failed as a writer after the publication of that one brilliant work. What diminished whatever potential there was in his later works?" (xiii). These oppositional narratives about Toomer's career have remained relatively untroubled.
Content's photograph, however, raises more than just the question of whether Toomer was writing in this period. It also exposes where he was writing. This is not an image captured in Sparta, Georgia, in the small cabin adjacent to the school where Toomer acted as substitute principal, a domicile eerily recreated in the "Kabnis" section of Cane. It is also not the lush interior of Toomer's childhood brownstone in Washington, DC, its propriety mimicked in the stifling atmosphere of Mrs. Pribby's house in Cane's "Box Seat." Nor is it the Chicago dorm room recorded in "Bona and Paul," perhaps modeled on Toomer's education at that city's American College of Physical Training. Instead, this photograph shows Toomer's books stacked neatly on the imperfectly curved bookshelf of a hand-built adobe house. He writes by the warmth of a distinctive, semi-circular kiva fireplace, a fixture of Pueblo architecture in the New Mexican Southwest. The graceful, rounded pottery of southwestern Indians is displayed on the mantle.
Toomer's time in the Southwest has been excluded from dominant critical narratives of his life and work. The literary footprint of his time in New Mexico exists only in the sparse fragments of Toomer's southwestern writing published in Frederik L. Rusch's A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings, and in the contributions to the "New Mexico Writers" section of the New Mexican Sentinel that have been reprinted and briefly addressed by Tom Quirk and Robert Fleming in Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Most of Toomer's southwestern writing and, indeed, the evidence of his time there, remains archived. (3) To read this archived work and explore Toomer's time in the Southwest complicates previous understandings of Toomer as a writer who never, after Cane, returned to "an open discussion of racial matters." When this archive is addressed it reveals that Toomer did, in fact, continue to discuss race, but that this discussion takes a different shape than it did in the locales informing Cane and its reception: the rural South, the urban North, and the New York publishing milieu, with its burgeoning attention to black texts. The southwestern archive shifts the critical optic away from Cane's fragmented formal qualities, its nostalgic location in a post-slavery historical milieu, and its modernist, New Negro sensibilities--qualities which continue to define Toomer and his literary worth--and towards a more nuanced understanding of the geographical and discursive matrix of race, location, and modernism and modernity proliferating in the interwar US.
Content's photograph relocates Toomer to the Southwest, in an adobe house near Taos. Doing so places Toomer in a space articulate with and yet distinct from the spaces of Cane and separates him from the Harlem scene in which he is usually read, however uncomfortably. (4) Informed by geography, his theories of racial formation and his writing about race differ depending on the site of their production and distribution. Despite Toomer's tenuous association with the Harlem scene, Cane is often read as the signal text of the New Negro movement, and falls in line with Renaissance obsessions with demarcating black modernity. Cane defines a new Negro against the old by juxtaposing the modern against the history of slavery, and also focuses on passing and racial ambiguity, topics rife within Harlem writing and symptoms of a widespread interest in processes of racial definition and categorization. The Southwest provides an alternative to these definitional impulses and is a space where, during this historical moment, racial discourses center not on codification, but on indeterminacy. Here, mestizaje, racial mixing, and the modern invention of a futuristic raza cosmica develop as modern configurations of race. Concomitantly, in the Southwest Toomer's own racial discourse moves from defining a race against the past to redefining the past in order to imagine the "new American race" of the future.
Toomer lived in the Southwest in sporadic, intermittent stints from 1925-1947. During these sojourns Toomer produced a surprising array of texts. The most substantive are a series of essays about this geographical locale (including "Noises at Night," "New Mexico after India," and "To this land where the clouds fall," all n.d., c. 1940) and a play called "A Drama of the Southwest" (n.d., c. 1935). (5) Toomer also produced a draft called "Sequences" (n.d., c. 1945), comprised of a series of short sketches about the New Mexican space, and an untitled notebook about New Mexico that appears to be the foundation of a novel (n.d., c. 1945). (6) He probably also continued work on his long poem "The Blue Meridian" (which contains southwestern images and was first published in 1936 in New Caravan) as well as several other poems that remained unpublished until the compilation of The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988). (7) It is likely that he also continued to work on his cryptically-titled autobiography, "Book X." Indeed, much of Toomer's southwestern writing is autobiographical.
Like many other modern writers and artists, Toomer was invited to Taos, New Mexico for the first time by art patron, socialite, and memoirist Mabel Dodge Luhan, who encouraged Toomer to consider the town for a Gurdjieffian center for spiritual development. Although his work on behalf of Gurdjieff brought him to Taos, Toomer continued to visit New Mexico long after he severed ties with his mentor, believing, perhaps, that New Mexico could provide fulfillment that Gurdjieff could not. When Toomer arrived in the Southwest it was already a landscape crowded with artists and writers. Realist painters such as those involved with the Taos Society of Artists had been active in the region since well before World War I, and the area opened up to modernists after Luhan's arrival in 1917, when she began promoting the space to figures like Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Andrew Dasburg. Many of these figures represent the southwestern space as dehistoricized and timeless, especially by constructing it in conversation with the paradigm of modern US cities, such as New York. (8) These modernists construct nostalgic primitivist renderings of the landscape and especially of its indigenous peoples, and present the Southwest and Pueblo Indians as untouched by modernism's directive...
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