“It is only half bad to be absurd in the face of the ridiculous. It is shameful to be ridiculous in the face of the significant.”

            ––Jean Toomer, Essentials

The author Jean Toomer achieved fame as a writer affiliated with both the 1920s Modernist Movement and the Harlem Renaissance only to separate from both in order to explore more deeply his spiritual interests. His quest for psychological freedom from oppressive racial concerns led him to become a follower of the mystic teacher Georges Gurdjieff, and to experience extended altered states of consciousness that some have compared to the concept of “enlightenment.”

            Born in Washington, D. C., on December 26, 1894, Toomer was christened Nathan Pinchback Toomer at birth.  Both his mother, Nina Pinchback Toomer, and his father, Nathan Toomer, came from biracial families. Although they looked Anglo-American, they were legally classified as “Negro” or African-American.  Toomer’s grandfather, Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, served during Reconstruction in the South as a senator, lieutenant governor, and governor for the state of Louisiana. He was the only African-American to obtain a governorship, albeit a brief one, in any state during Reconstruction.  

            Toomer’s father essentially abandoned his family after his wife became pregnant, leaving her in 1895 and divorcing in 1899.  His mother gave him the nickname “Eugene” as a child and this name stuck until later, as an adult, he shortened it to “Jean” for use as his literary pseudonym. Marrying Archibald Cumber in 1906, Nina moved with her new husband and her son Nathan to Brooklyn, New York. However, Toomer’s mother died in 1909 and he grew up primarily in Washington, D. C., with his Uncle Bismarck Pinchback and his maternal grandparents. Toomer would later credit his Uncle Bismarck with helping him to develop a sense of scientific inquiry and an appreciation for such cultural elements as fine art and literature. 

            In 1914, the future author and spiritual instructor graduated from Washington’s famed Dunbar High School.  His secondary education was eclectic, encompassing physical conditioning at the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, Illinois, and the study of agriculture in Milwaukee at the University of Wisconsin. He traveled to New York City in 1917 and undertook diverse studies at New York University and City College.  In 1918, he ceased his formal education to write and study independently. He lived alternately in Chicago, New York, and Milwaukee.

            Toomer began between 1918 and 1920 to compose the literary fragments that eventually would serve as the genesis for Cane, his acknowledged masterpiece.  In 1920, he met Waldo Frank, the popular modernist author of Our America.  Frank would in turn play several roles in Toomer’s life: that of mentor, rival in romance, and spiritual student.

            In 1921, Toomer accepted an invitation to take a temporary summer job as the principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial School in Sparta, Georgia, an area where his father had lived. During this period, Toomer further gathered and developed material for inclusion in Cane by giving voice and license to what he considered the “Negro element” in his blood.  As different poems and stories were published in such Anglo-oriented literary magazines as Modern Review and Literary Review, and, in such black-oriented publications as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Crisis magazine, Toomer began increasingly to draw the attention of white modernists as well as the black literary artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Upon the publication of Cane, by Boni and Liveright Publishing, in 1923, both groups hailed him as a literary genius. The modernists saw in Toomer a social visionary whose uninhibited manner in writing about sexuality, race relations, and personal identity, fit in perfectly with their own agenda to place the restrictions of their Victorian parents’ stifling conservatism as far behind them as possible.  Leaders of the Harlem Renaissance championed Toomer’s work as further evidence that a true renaissance of African-American culture was underway. 

Cane is less like a novel than a literary montage of short fiction, poetry, and drama all woven together by the thread of Toomer’s highly lyrical style.  Set in Georgia, Washington, D. C., and Chicago, the book examines the impact of history and racial consciousness on both the inner and external lives of African Americans.  That Toomer possessed a strong mystical sensibility was already highly evident in Cane. For example, the narrator in the story of “Fern,” observes the following: “I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had vision.  People have them in Georgia more often than you would suppose. A black woman once saw the mother of Christ and drew her in charcoal on the courthouse wall…When one is on the soil of one’s ancestors, most anything can come to one…” However, this sensibility can easily be interpreted as poetic style rather than the kind of spiritual instruction Toomer would attempt to communicate in later works and that would cost him his success as a popular publishable author.

With the publication of Cane, which featured a foreword by his friend Frank, Toomer was drawn more deeply into a circle of modernists that included the poet Hart Crane, the gifted artist Georgia O’Keefe, photographer pioneer Alfred Steiglitz, writer Kay Boyle, and many others. In addition, his romantic involvement with Frank’s wife Margaret Naumburg and his later marriage to the white author Margery Latimer, linked him more closely socially to the modernists.

Nevertheless, among black writers he became affiliated with Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and others. Toomer’s association and identification with writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance was an uneasy one because he preferred to think of himself more as American than as African American.  Technically, the author recognized himself as the product of at least half a dozen bloodlines, including: African, Dutch, English, French Creole, German, Native American, and Spanish.  But he was also convinced that the classification of human beings by race was an artificial and useless invention that did more spiritual and psychological harm than good. 

In 1924, Toomer began studying “Unitism,” the mystic Georges Gurdjieff’s system of personal spiritual development designed to help human beings attain physical and mental states as close to perfection as possible. Toomer initially studied Unitism under the tutelage of A. E. Orage, the editor of The New English Weekly. He then traveled to Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieure Estate in Fontainbleau, approximately 40 miles outside of Paris, France. There, Toomer joined a group of distinguished Gurdjieff followers that included a variety of writers, artists, and musicians.

Central to Gurdjieff’s teachings was the belief that human beings could perfect themselves to such a degree that they achieved an “objective awareness” of themselves as integral parts of a conscious living universe, or what some might refer to as God.  He further proposed that the average human lived his or her life in a state of mental and social conditioning that was much like a form of unconscious hypnosis. This state of unrecognized hypnosis prevented them from experiencing the greater strength, beauty, or potential of their “essence,” or true higher self. The concept of such a state would prove popular as a theme in the writings of both modernist writers and later authors such as William S. Burroughs.

In a method described as The Fourth Way, Gurdjieff avowed that an integrated approach of exercises to discipline the mind, body, and spirit could liberate individuals from their everyday hypnotic state and allow them to live a more dynamically empowered life.  Toomer became such an ardent follower of Gurdjieff’s teachings that he eventually became an instructor for him and remained one for some 10 years. He established branches of Gurdjieff’s learning center in Chicago, Harlem, and elsewhere, becoming both an important fundraiser for the mystical instructor and an influential representative of this ideas.

In addition to the esoteric teachings of Gurdjieff, Toomer also studied Madame H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, and P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. Both texts offer a system of spiritual philosophy that promotes the achievement of a higher consciousness superior to the physical sensory awareness, or social conditioning, of everyday human beings.  Moreover, Toomer also adopted in his writings the form of “objective literature” that Gurdjieff modeled in his densely encoded metaphysical book, Beelzebub’s Tales. Such literature directly opposed the kind of stylized modernist literature that brought Toomer fame with the publication of Cane.  Objective literature promoted instead works that taught and dramatized specific psychological or spiritual–– as in Gurdjieffian–– principles.

In 1926, Toomer had a powerful visionary experience that he would later write about in an unpublished book, part of a series of autobiographies, called From Exile into Being. For him, the experience validated his belief in the existence of higher consciousness and the ability of people to achieve it. Living at the time in New York, he was waiting for a train at the Sixty-sixth Street El Station when, suddenly, he “awoke to a dimensionally higher consciousness.  Another being , a radically different being, became present and manifesting.” Whereas people generally think of their minds or sense of awareness as existing inside their bodies, Toomer’s experience reversed this dynamic so that he had the sense of his mind or center of awareness as existing outside his body.  Unlike the sensation reported with recorded out-of-body experiences, his body was not motionless or unconscious but seemingly empty of conscious animation.  He described himself as being “born above the body,” and willed himself to move almost in the same manner that a puppeteer might manipulate a puppet.  Rather than feeling himself as the inhabitant of a single human body, he felt himself the inhabitant of a thriving living universe.  In literary terms, the experience could be likened to that expressed by Walt Whitman in his opus Leaves of Grass.  In mystical terms, it was the achievement of objective transcendence beyond human limitation. 

Unique in Toomer’s experience from similar events recorded by many others was the fact that his lasted a full two weeks.  While in this state, he enjoyed a sense of boundless energy and clairvoyant vision that allowed him to see, like the visionary artist Luther E. Vann, the essence of people’s spiritual selves in brilliant contrast to their more dull physical selves. While this experience of super-consciousness eventually ended, it changed forever Toomer’s perception of himself and his priorities as both a writer and a human being. He remained productive as a writer but his literary work became subordinate to his spiritual pursuits.

Toomer continued to publish short stories, poems, essays, and aphorisms in periodicals such as the Little Review and Crisis magazine but could not obtain a publishing outlet for major book-length projects after the success of Cane.  In 1927, he wrote the novel The Gallonwerps and the next year adapted it into a play. The novel’s characters were reportedly modeled after members of Gurdjieff groups led by Toomer.  Each character exemplified typical human beings in need of the kind of objective awareness brought to them by the character named “Prince Klondike,” or Toomer himself.  Publishers did not accept the need for some form of alternative spiritual enlightenment as suitable material for fiction and, in addition to The Gallonwerps, it caused them to reject Toomer’s subsequent novels, Transatlantic in 1929, and Caromb in 1932. Similarly, they declined his autobiography, Earth-Being, in 1930. Despite the rejections, Toomer would revise his novels and autobiographies throughout the rest of his life. Ironically, while Toomer refused to classify himself racially, it was primarily the black writers of the Harlem Renaissance who made sure his name and work remained in print by publishing various poems and prose fragments in anthologies such as The New American Caravan in 1929. 

 He self-published the collection of aphorisms entitled Essentials in 1931 (republished by Hill Street Press in 2000). In this small powerful book, Toomer communicated in short bursts of insight some of his evolving spiritual ideas, such as the following: “Each wrong idea kills one right instinct”; “The only man who can leave the earth to other men is he who has won himself”; and, “We do not suffer: seldom does our essence suffer; but pride, vanity, egotism suffer in us.”

Although Toomer officially separated from Gurdjieff’s organization in 1935, he continued for several years to independently conduct classes based on Gurdjieff’s techniques and philosophy.  He moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1936, and there began an association with Quakers, or the Society of Friends, that eventually would lead to another outlet for his spiritual pursuits.  His search for greater spiritual truth and empowerment took him to New Mexico in 1937 and to India, where he visited the celebrated author Rabindranath Tagore, in 1939. He officially joined the Quakers in 1940 and began writing for the Friends Intelligencer.  His articles for this Quaker journal covered such topics as “Authority, Inner and Outer,” “The Uncommon Man,” and “Worship and Love.”

Following a kidney operation in 1940, declining health led Toomer to seek a spiritual reading from one of America’s most famed psychics, Edgar Cayce, on June 22, 1943. In his reading, Cayce noted deterioration in the function of Toomer’s glandular organs and the presence of toxic poisons in his nervous system. He prescribed for Toomer a form of therapy utilizing ultraviolet rays and purification of his digestive system. Toomer reported significant improvement after following Cayce’s instructions.

To one degree or another, Toomer remained active as a writer throughout the 1940s and 1950s. However, he was not celebrated as such until the advent of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s when Cane was republished for the first time in 40 years and hailed as a true classic of modern American literature.  Having sacrificed his fame for the pursuit of his spiritual ideals, Toomer died on March 30, 1967.      

Further Reading

Aberjhani. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Facts On

            File, 2003.

Byrd, Rudolph P. Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist,

1923-1936. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Eldridge, Richard and Kerman, Cynthia Earl. The Lives of Jean Toomer: A

Hunger for Wholeness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 1987.

Toomer, Jean and Turner, Darwin T. (editor). Wayward and the Seeking: A

Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (reprint). Washington, D. C.:

Howard University Press, 1984.

Aberjhani

©2/18/2005