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Jean Toomer
Race, Repression, and Revolution
By Barbara Foley UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09632-7
CHAPTER 1
Touching Naked Reality
Socialism, the Labor Movement, and the Embers of Revolution
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.
—IWW constitution preamble, 1905
I recognized as never before the need of socialism, the need of a radical change of the conditions of human society.
—Jean Toomer, untitled 1936 autobiography
The scholarship on Jean Toomer has largely overlooked the substantial evidence indicating his serious early interest in leftist politics, as well as his abiding leftist conscience. Toomer's publications in the Socialist press, when taken into account at all, have been routinely interpreted as expressions of a youthful romanticism soon abandoned. His two-week-long experience working in a New Jersey shipyard in December 1919, which presumably proved to him the proletariat's indifference to its own exploitation, is often cited as the terminus of his fascination with socialism. The 1998 publication of Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr's Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, which argues persuasively for the impact of a leftist politics on Cane, has not substantially altered the depoliticized paradigms through which the majority of scholars continue to view Toomer and his 1923 masterwork.
Toomer himself, it should be added, played no small role in setting the terms of this agenda. The unpublished autobiographies of his adult years that he composed during his years as a disciple of Gurdjieff—"The Outline of an Autobiography" (1931) and "On Being an American" (1934)—largely effaced the evidence of his radical political involvements. Darwin Turner's reliance on these typewritten texts in patching together the autobiographical narrative published in The Wayward and the Seeking (1980) has strongly influenced the terms in which scholars and general readers have construed the meaning and shape of Toomer's life up to and through the writing of Cane. Although in 1936 Toomer composed an account that contradicts the 1931 and 1934 narratives in crucial respects, this autobiography remains unpublished and only available in archives; its inaccessibility limits its reference in the great majority of critical commentaries on Cane.
My principal goal here is to demonstrate that Toomer's early commitment to socialism was neither superficial nor temporary. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, he entertained strong hopes for a workers' revolution in the United States; when the conjuncture of 1919 failed to materialize as an event, his disappointment was deep and lasting. Toomer was hardly an engaged participant in radical political movements. His direct ties with members of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) appear to have been few, most likely formed through his frequent visits to the SPA-affiliated Rand School in 1918–20 and his contacts at the New York Call. There is, moreover, no clear evidence that, other than through his acquaintance with the Liberator, he was acquainted with members of the fledgling Communist Party during the Cane period. In many ways an astute observer and analyst of the wartime and postwar left-wing upsurge, Toomer carried forward from his observations and experiences not only an appreciation of the violent repression visited on rebels against the capitalist regime but also an understanding of the role played by racism in hamstringing the working-class movement. Optimistic—for a period—about the possibilities for revolutionary change, he was alert to some of the limitations of American Socialism, uncritical of others. But the complex amalgam of views expressed in Toomer's early political writings would carry over into the composition of Cane; Toomer's 1923 text cannot be understood apart from the hopes and pressures generated by the radical upsurge of 1919.
"An intelligible scheme of things": The 1931 and 1934 Accounts of Finding Socialism
Toomer's various accounts of his encounter with socialism emphasize quite different features of its appeal. "The Outline of an Autobiography" offers a largely dismissive assessment:
I had been, I suppose, unconsciously seeking—as man must ever seek—an intelligible scheme of things, a sort of whole into which everything fit, or seemed to fit, a body of ideas which held a consistent view of life and which enabled me to see and understand as one does when he sees a map. Socialism was the first thing of this kind I had encountered.... It was not so much the facts or ideas, taken singly, that aroused me.... More it was the body, the scheme, the order and inclusion. These evoked and promised to satisfy all in me that had been grasping for form amid the disorders and chaos of my personal experiences.
Widely cited in commentary on Toomer, this account suggests that he was attracted not so much by the content of socialist doctrine as by its formal structure and therapeutic holism.
Describing his dizzying wanderings over the next four years—including short stints at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Massachusetts, the American School of Physical Culture (Chicago), the University of Chicago, New York University, and Columbia University—the 1931 autobiography records Toomer's early attraction to leftist politics and leftist people. In Chicago, for instance, he established a friendship with a serious-minded young woman, Eleanor Davis—"the first girl of my own age who could meet me in terms of understanding and interest in the ways of life"—with whom he shared an interest in socialism. The 1931 text tends to downplay Toomer's interest in Bolshevism, however, noting that when he began to attend classes at New York's Rand School in the spring of 1918, he was "still a socialist in my political and economic and sociological views—but now it was a compound of ideas of Lester F. Ward and Bernard Shaw." After working at an East Side settlement house and intensively studying music in the fall of 1918, Toomer wrote, he experienced a breakdown and went upstate to an unspecified site in Ellenville—"a place I knew of in the mountains"—where he was "seized by a passion for writing" and composed "long letters which usually dealt with world-matters as I saw them." Returning to Washington, DC, the following spring, he made a temporary truce with his despairing grandparents, only to depart once again to bum around upstate New York with a friend from his Wisconsin days, returning to Washington in the late summer. His grandparents' frustration became too much for him, however, and within a few months Toomer was on the road again, hitchhiking toward New York City on December 20 and arriving the next evening.
According to the 1931 autobiography, the next day Toomer started work in a New Jersey shipyard:
The work was hard, harder than I ever thought work could be. The steel of the half-finished ships was terribly cold. Just to touch it was enough to freeze you. ... All day long I had to cramp myself under heavy plates, in small compartments, and work the holes so that bolts could be slid in from the top. I was called a fitter. I got $22.00 a week. After ten days of it, I quit. And that, by the way, finished socialism for me. The men who worked in those yards—and they were realistic workmen—had two main interests: playing craps and sleeping with women. Socialism? Well, it was for people like Shaw and Sidney Webb. ... It was the way they saw social life. But as for working a great betterment in the lives of the proletariat—this was a pipe dream only to those who had never really experienced the proletariat.
Relegating the "pipe dream" appeal of socialism to Fabian intellectuals, this passage—reproduced in The Wayward and the Seeking and widely quoted in the scholarship on Toomer—proposes that to "experience the proletariat" is to grant the harshness of its conditions of labor but acknowledge its imperviousness to higher things.
"On Being an American," the 1934 autobiography, offers a still more truncated view of Toomer's youthful leaning toward the left:
Readings of Darwin and Haeckel, the evolutionists, the materialists, and the atheists, stripped me of all religious belief; and, though my mind was greatly stimulated, my emotions were such that for a time I felt as if the bottom of the world had dropped from under, leaving me dangling like a man being hung.
Socialism stripped me of my republican aristocratic notions; and I felt myself to be a comrade of the mass of men of no destiny whose life is caught and thwarted in the injustices and stupidities of an acquisitive society.
Life ripped at my props and stays until they toppled. All things tore at my ego until I seemed to have none left, until I felt myself as pulp, sunken, prostrate, doomed to failure.
Toomer concludes, "I worked in a shipyard and therefore could no longer idealize the proletariat." Although more self-critical here—he admits his past elitism—he posits a reader who will agree that direct experience with the working class will of necessity ("therefore") produce disillusionment.
"Naked I touched naked reality": The Encounter with Socialism in the Mid-1930s Autobiographies
The 1931 and 1934 autobiographies were written when Toomer was deeply involved in the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. As the leader of a Gurdjieff group based in Chicago, he was interacting primarily with the movement's well-heeled white acolytes: the implied reader invoked in these texts, while liberal, would hardly have been a partisan of workers' revolution. By 1935, however, when Toomer had retreated from Gurdjieff and revived his contacts on the left, he authored an autobiography that offers a significantly different slant on his first encounter with socialism. The working-class men he encountered in Chicago were "not free and equal citizens of a democracy.... They were futureless, anything but masters of their own lives." Himself unemployed, he "realized that, like myself, there were countless numbers of people out of work ... pounding the pavements from place to place.... It was appalling." In this account, Toomer's growing sense of identification with the needs of the working class, more than his personal alienation, is what sparks his interest in socialism. Of the large numbers of families sleeping on Grand Boulevard's grassy median strip on hot summer evenings, he wrote, "Chicago in summer gave the impression ... that the workers' revolution had already taken place and that the city belonged not to the few but to the many." Finding himself "in the midst of Chicago's radical and liberal movements," he was formally introduced to socialist doctrine by one Farrell, an instructor at the American College of Physical Culture:
Then and there, hemmed in by the lockers, with fellows standing around, he presented to me the cardinal ideas of what he understood to be socialism. The economic division of society into three main classes, capitalist, bourgeois, and workers. That contemporary society was organized and maintained for the benefit of the capitalists as against the workers. That opportunity was a myth.... That rich men get rich because they exploit natural resources and human labor, defrauding the workers of a just portion of the wealth which they, the workers, help bring into existence. That the state should take over the main industries upon which everyone was dependent. That there should be an equitable distribution of wealth.... That the workers, now the slaves of the parasites, would come into their rightful inheritance only on the condition that they organized themselves and in some way stripped the parasites of their power.
The young Toomer initially rejected Farrell's message: "I was a member of the ruling class.... [If] a revolution came and slaves were victorious ... I'd proudly repeat the way of the aristocrats during the French revolution and ride ... to the guillotine with my head up." Soon, however, he "acknowledged that the main ideas [Farrell] voiced were ... true to justice and humanity and a fair full life for all, necessary to myself as I outgrew myself and stepped beyond my ego-prison to become a social being, invaluable to me in my efforts to understand and orient myself to the larger scheme of things, now breaking upon me, of which I was but a part." The "larger scheme" of socialism is portrayed here not as a structuring idea, imposed upon reality from without, but as an attribute of actual social relations.
According to the untitled 1936 autobiography, once Toomer arrived in New York in 1918, he did all he could to enter and expand "my chosen world" by regularly attending lectures at the Cooper Union and the Rand School and cultivating the acquaintance of such prominent literary leftists as the poet Lola Ridge and the Dial editor Lewis Mumford. Socialism was "germinating in the subsoil of my common human feelings," he recalled. "[M]y roots began to push down and find fastening." Working with working-class youth at an East Side settlement house, he was "outraged ... that these young people, if left to themselves to acquire the 'ideals' that were floating around in their environment, would grow up and devote their lives to obtaining just the falsities of a civilization which our best minds had learned to condemn and reject." Toomer's politics caused a stir: "One or two of my fellow residents demanded that a stop be put to my activities, charging that I was a 'radical' bent on undermining not only the Settlement but all American institutions."
Where the 1931 and 1934 autobiographies convey the impression that in early 1919 Toomer recuperated from stress and overwork in a state of glorious isolation in the Catskills, the 1936 text indicates that his hosts, Lide and Charles Goldsmith, were a politically progressive farming couple who nurtured—and perhaps humored—their "paying guest." "I began talking, ... [T]hey responded and I talked more," Toomer recalled. "Now I wanted to reach more people." He and his hosts on one occasion trudged several miles through snowdrifts to a gathering of neighbors "on another mountain," where he held forth. "It was quite a meeting, if only to the three of us," Toomer recalled. "One or two others got something from what I said. The rest, as I learned later, mostly puzzled or wondered." While at the Goldsmiths' farm, Toomer "subscribed to several magazines" and William Randolph Hearst's New York American, delighting in George Bernard Shaw's sardonic commentary on the secret prewar treaties among the imperialist powers. With his "interest in the outside world revived," Toomer began writing—and presumably distributing—mimeographed letters that "sprang straight from my inner life in a molten lucid state, straight from my need to put in words what I had to say"; these letters "constituted my social life, my 'propaganda,' my practice in writing, all in one." Although the Goldsmiths' guest had hardly shrugged off his youthful narcissism, he evidently took his leftist education far more seriously—and passionately—than is indicated in the 1931 and 1934 texts. He also appears to have had no qualms about discussing his mixed racial ancestry with his hosts; as with Eleanor Davis in Chicago, the context of radical politics enabled him to be transparent about his family background.
Since Toomer's supposed debacle with the shipyard workers in Elizabeth, New Jersey, is usually viewed as the terminus of his political leftism, the version of this episode in the 1936 autobiography—consisting of more than thirty handwritten pages—warrants particular notice. Toomer recounts the long, cold predawn commute from Manhattan and then the harshness of labor in the "freezing inferno," where he manipulated "the holes ... the bolts ... the nuts ... down in the zero hell and dark of what was to be the hold of a ship." Even worse than the physical hardship of the work itself was its numbing effect on mind and spirit: "Each day, if possible, I had lost more of myself and become just another doomed body on the train, in the yards, going through with it in utter identification as if I had no past but this, no future but this, this pitiless compression, of my life between plates of steel." The "ravaged" faces of his coworkers "haunted" him—"not their faces only, not their eyes only, but their spirits crucified in life, up against it and nailed there." Toomer was occasionally "thrilled aesthetically by the purity and perfect functioning of that slender [crane's] arm as delicate as an etching and yet so powerful. So, I told myself, so a perfect mind might lift the bulk of knowledge and deposit it for mankind to build a world." He gained sustenance from the thought that the ship he was building would be used, and that, seeing it in the future, he might think, "I worked on you, ship, I helped make you." But he feared losing his larger sense of purpose, seeing that "[what] happens to others began to happen to me from the first day I went on the job." The foremen were like "slavedrivers," and the
so-called work in the yard was in truth a sort of grim game played by slaves and masters who matched wits, the one to do as little work as possible and yet get a pay check, the other to exact and extract all work possible not for ships but for profits. Ships? How ironical.... To the workers, it was a salary-yard essentially undistinguishable from the thousands of salary-yards spread all over the kingdom of industry and finance. To the owners it was a profit-yard, similarly undistinguished.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jean Toomer by Barbara Foley. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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