Jean Toomer writes for the New York Call
One hundred years ago today … Jean Toomer published the essay "Americans and Mary Austin," in the socialist daily newspaper, the New York Evening Call. It was the third contribution to the Call for the 26-year-old Black writer in his phase as a political essayist. Three years later he would publish his his book of verse, Cane (1923), a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.
In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee Van Demarr offer a reading of the article that explains its contexts and purpose, calling it “the work of someone familiar with the terrain of American racism” (67). Toomer’s piece responds to Mary Austin's article, “New York: Dictator of American Criticism,” published in the July 20 issue of The Nation. (The Internet Archive offers a text-only version of the entire Nation issue here.)
Austin, who had for twenty years been a critically and commercially successful writer about United States culture, specifically the rural, western US, complains in her essay that “a small New York group” is dominating the country’s literary scene. It turns out that her unhappiness with the New York critics and writers is largely based on their being immigrants or children of immigrants, and most specifically, Jewish. Her particular ire is directed at Waldo Frank and his 1919 book Our America.
Taking on Austin’s anti-Jewish stance, Toomer writes:
It thus appears to me that what was nominally a valid protest against the one-sided development of the American intellect degenerates into a force misdirected against the intellect vested in a single race. Desiring the inevitable amalgamation and consequent cultural unity, Miss Austin's article has given new cause for old race consciousness. Aiming at a community of cultured differences, she serves the cause of disunion.
Read the entirety of "Americans and Mary Austin" here.
Beefcake photo of Toomer ca. 1920. Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995, p. 43.
Toomer, born in Washington, D.C. to two mixed-race parents, had moved to New York in 1917 to attend classes first at New York University, then City College. In previous years, he had led a peripatetic life, wandering through Madison, Chicago, New Haven, riding the rails, bodybuilding, studying agriculture, history and socialism.
The year 1920 can be considered a turning point for Toomer. Steven Watson recounts that Toomer got invited to a party at the Greenwich Village apartment of Lola Ridge, editor of the avant-garde journal Broom, where he met Frank.
Sarah Greenough, “Alfred Stieglitz/Waldo Frank/1920,” Alfred Stieglitz Key Set, NGA Online Editions.
The party and subsequent correspondence with Frank led to Toomer’s epiphany that “he would be a writer,” and his decision to leave New York for DC and begin work on Cane (42-43). Watson’s narrative does not quite square up with the Scruggs accounts of Toomer and Frank’s meeting, nor with Toomer’s journalistic pursuits of 1919-1920 ; regardless, it is clear that Toomer’s 1920 experience in and move from New York marked a new direction in his publishing career.
References/Further reading:
Charles Scruggs and Lee Van Demarr. Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Watson, Steven. The Harlem Renaissance. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, OCTOBER 10, 2020.
TAGS: African American, black writers, modernism, Journalism, poets, Harlem Renaissance, Waldo Frank, socialist newspapers, socialism, anti-semitism