The Romantic Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer
In his only novel on African Americans, Jean Toomer also found
beauty in the "vernacular culture" among the people in Sparta,
Georgia, where Toomer spent two months working as an interim
principal at the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in
1921 (Byrd 733). Nathan Pinchback Toomer (1894-1967) changed his
name to Jean after his move to Greenwich Village and reading
Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe (1904), in an effort to
"solidify his emerging identity as a writer" (Byrd 733).
Toomer's experimental novel, Cane (1923), is described as
"a record of his discovery of his southern heritage, an homage
to a folk culture that he believed was evanescent, and an
exploration of the forces that he believed were the foundation
for the spiritual fragmentation of his generation" (Byrd 733).
Although Toomer continued writing after the publication of
Cane until the time of his death, he did not have any
other works of fiction published during his lifetime (Byrd 733).
After coming under the influence Georgei I. Gurdjieff, a Russian
mystic and psychologist, Toomer never returned to depicting
African American life (Byrd 733). This change in subject matter
could be attributed to Toomer's efforts to "transcend" the
"narrow divisions of race" (Byrd 734). Due to his desire for
transcendence of racial boundaries, Toomer's later writings do
not employ any racial themes; also this desire led Toomer to
disassociate himself from Cane, the "work that has earned
him a central place in the African American literary tradition"
(Byrd 734).
Despite Toomer's later rejection of racial themes, many of the
Harlem writers were considerably influenced by Cane, such
as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston, the most
prolific black woman writer in her lifetime, is the most
extraordinary, intriguing, but ultimately tragic, participant in
the Harlem Renaissance.
Bibliography
Byrd, Rudolph P. "Jean Toomer." The Oxford Companion to
African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews,
Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997. 733-734.