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Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank. Ed. Kathleen Pfeiffer. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2010. 208 pp. $45.00.
Jean Toomer. Cane: A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Rudolph P. Byrd. New York: Norton, 2011. 472 pp. $13.95.
Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Waldo Frank, author of Our America (1919) and Holiday (1923), were intimate friends who greatly influenced each other's writing. Toomer's letters to Frank were edited by Mark Whalan and published in 2006, but prior to the release of Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, edited by Kathleen Pfeiffer, their complete correspondence had not been published. Through assiduous archival research, Pfeiffer presents the full arc of Toomer and Frank's homosocial bond and eventual estrangement. Juxtaposing Brother Mine and Cane enriches our understanding of the complex language in Toomer's modernist masterpiece. Pfeiffer's book also chronicles a salient episode in relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans: the trip that Toomer and Frank took to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where Frank, a Jew, passed as an African American. Furthermore, readers interested in modernist letters will find Pfeiffer's text a worthy companion to the recently published correspondence between Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz. The descriptions and insights that Toomer and Frank poured into their letters rival the best writing in their published works.
Recent criticism on Cane has tried to displace Frank's influence on Toomer in favor of the latter's involvement with African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Pfeiffer's expertise on Waldo Frank's life and work enables her to reestablish the important role he played in shaping Cane. Her informative introduction and biographical notes provide a framework for reading the letters, and by using references to events and dated letters in undated letters, she has painstakingly reconstructed the chronology of Toomer and Frank's correspondence. Most importantly, Brother Mine refocuses scholars' attention on Toomer's and Frank's writing from the "Cane Years," 1919-1924. Too much scholarship privileges their revisionist accounts of their friendship, which were distorted by the political, religious, and philosophical preoccupations of their later years.
The primary critical intervention that Pfeiffer offers is that, contrary to Toomer's later claims, his estrangement from Frank was not due to his disappointment over his...