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Nineteen twenty-three was a momentous year in Jean Toomer's life. The publication of Cane, a cluster of thematically related sketches, stories, and poems about black people in Georgia and Washington, D.C., signaled his emergence as a talented young writer whom many associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Later in the year Toomer discovered the teachings of Georgi Gurdjieff, whose Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was becoming internationally famous. While Cane was emerging as a minor classic during the 1920s, Toomer devoted himself to Gurdjieff, creating confusions about his loyalties that never ceased to plague him. Although his Gurdjieffian connection is well known, it is rarely taken seriously, and even today Toomer is usually discussed only as a “black” writer. Perhaps for a while he was, but his youthful fascination with race for its own sake slowly evolved into a racially conscious, then a radically unconscious, universalism. In that process, Gurdjieffian teachings were the catalyst, and it was clear to Toomer that his involvement with the “movement”—not race—was the defining quality of his life. |
