Forerunners in the Tradition of Black Letters
The Wayward and the Seeking includes autobiographical selections, short fiction, poetry, two plays, and a number of Toomer's aphorisms and maxims … a representative selection of Toomer's creative efforts between 1924 and the mid-1930s. It is an important work because, for the first time, it provides an opportunity for understanding the relationship between the man and the artist and, by extension, the relationship among the boundaries of personal freedom, social limitations, and the creative process. (p. 158)
[Autobiography] is important to any study of Toomer, both because of Toomer's interest in that literary form as a tool of introspection, a method of evaluating and understanding the self, and because it is our main source of information about the development of his life. Toomer wrote a great deal about himself, often weaving autobiographical elements into his fiction, as in the writing of Cane…. Toomer's penchant for examining his own experiences probably began many years earlier and grew out of his childhood preoccupation with his interior world….
Here we have his reflections on his life from early childhood through his fourteenth year, his descriptions of his family, his account of how Cane was written, and the immediate subsequent events. This account of Jean Toomer's life is a moving description of the struggle between a fickle fate over which he had no control and a young man's resolve to rise above its caprice. The possibility of failure was intolerable to him and his unrelenting search for a life's work, carried out by discarding one option after another in fast succession for many years, resulted from an inordinate fear of not succeeding….
His autobiographical accounts are permeated with explanations of his racial origins. The meaning of race, a troubling question for him, was at the center of his thinking for much of his life. He never understood why the world refused to accept him as a member of the human race, as an American, neither white nor black, but as the total of all that had gone into his making. He firmly believed in the concept of nonracial identity; it was the rest of the world that found this untenable.
Of the fiction included in this book, one story, "Withered Skin of Berries," is reminiscent of Cane, combining themes of race, identity, and racial prejudice. The remaining two emphasize the barrenness of the modern world and man's alienation. Toomer spoke for spiritual rebirth and for a return to values more closely allied to a unity with the natural world. Although flawed by overt didacticism, the pictorial language reminds us of Cane and Toomer's enviable command of metaphor….
Two of his previously unpublished works, "Natalie Mann" and "The Sacred Factory," are included here: one a provocative approach to the black middle class, the other stressing the futility of life when spiritual values are missing. These works give us an idea of the direction of Toomer's thought during a period when he had given up literature in favor of a more philosophic and religious approach to the problems of the human condition. (p. 159)
From The Wayward and the Seeking we see that Toomer claimed literature as a tool for human growth and development. Disaffected with the world of art by 1923, he nevertheless saw himself as a writer concerned with Western civilization, and with America in particular. The Gurdjieff philosophy which he embraced held out a promise of cosmic consciousness, and he accepted the challenge to apply it to American life. In reading his later writings, we are aware that Toomer sublimated the artist in himself after Cane, but his ability to use language in a powerful way was not lost. Had he received encouragement from sympathetic publishers and help from competent editors, he might have continued as a productive writer. (p. 162)
Nellie Y. McKay, "Forerunners in the Tradition of Black Letters," in Harvard Educational Review (copyright © 1981 by President and Fellows of Harvard College), Vol. 51, No. 1, February, 1981, pp. 158-62.∗
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