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Robert B. Jones, ed. Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1996. 160 pp. $25.00.
Jean Toomer has long been an enigmatic figure in both American literature and African American culture. The breathtaking lyricism of Cane (1923) demonstrates his gift for literary expression, yet many critics believe that he never realized the artistic potential so evident in that collection of stories, poems, and sketches. Toomer did see several essays and poems appear in print, but he died in obscurity, frustrated by his inability to market much of his work. Many scholars argue that he failed because he rejected his African American heritage after Cane appeared, and cite his two marriages to white women as evidence. Yet while it is true that, as a published author, Jean Toomer qualifies as a literary "one-hit wonder," as a writer, he was dedicated and prolific, to say the least. Anyone who has browsed the catalogue of his papers at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library knows that Toomer's literary output was voluminous and wide-ranging, sometimes cryptic and uneven, and often stylistically innovative and intellectually experimental. Darwin T. Turner's important volume The Wayward and the Seeking (1980), which includes selections from Toomer's several autobiographies and his fiction, prose, and drama, first drew attention to these writings, thereby enriching our understanding of the complex writer; the late Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer co-edited the valuable Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988); and more recently, Frederick L. Rusch's A Jean Toomer Reader (1993) presents some of Toomer's letters and his previously unpublished material. Now, we have still greater access to his writings: Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism, edited by the late Robert B. Jones. This slim, dense volume not only attests to Toomer's heretofore underappreciated critical aptitude; it also challenges the simplistic myth of his racial self-- hatred by demonstrating the complexity of his views on race and literature.
Jean Toomer did not suddenly abandon African American culture after writing Cane; he had long been active in both the black and the white worlds. Jones's introduction stresses this fact and positions Toomer on the bridge connecting Lost Generation and Negro Renaissance. "To my mind," he writes, "Toomer's significance must ultimately be evaluated...