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Cane
A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.
116 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1923
About the author
Jean Toomer
40 books127 followersJean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
(from Wikipedia)
He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 846 reviews
December 25, 2018
Quiet and eerie, Cane trembles with surreal beauty. Toomer's language is at once lucid and suggestive, his subjects disturbing and anguished; the tension between Toomer's aesthetically appealing prose and his painful subject matter proves to be increasingly unsettling as the book unfolds. Juxtaposing poetry and prose, past and present, north and south, script and narrative, the three-part experimental work of fiction also defies easy categorization, further upsetting readers' expectations and emotions. Despite the short book's disconcerting character, or because of it, Cane is spellbinding: it feels impossible to put aside, once begun.
January 12, 2020
My friend knows how infatuated I am with literature from the Harlem Renaissance era, so he called when he included this book on his teaching list. It brought back memories of the many literary socials we had over a few brews on our grad school's verandah: readings, discussions, snippets of music here and there, more readings, which led to social commentary and such, which, in turn, led to just plain chitchat about book preferences and how they affect everyday life; a conversation that lasted past midnight and brought our colleagues to the verandah for either a drink, or to say please keep it down I'm working on my lecture notes.
I could use layers of perspective, he told me. So I pulled this book from my shelf and highlighted sections. Then I pulled my copy of The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke (one of my favorite writers from that period), and highlighted William Braithwaite's excellent essay, "The Negro in American Literature" where he notes: "Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and flame, of ecstasy and pain..." To give a personal look at Toomer and the discussion around the writing and controversial publishing of Cane, I referenced sections of Langston Hughes' The Big Sea and highlighted sections of Henry Louis Gates' Afterword in this copy.
Jean Toomer was the first writer of the twenties to encapsulate black peasant life. Having lived in Georgia, I'm familiar with the Sparta he writes about and in most instances, the portrait remains the same. It is said that Ernest Gaines finds that he and Toomer shared a similar commitment to writing about the lives of black farmers. Cane, with its singular structure of poetry, prose and drama, contributed significantly to Afro-American modernism. Toomer referred to it as his "swan-song," the "song of an end." He was trying to record a fading art form that would transition during the first part of the twentieth century:
"The earth is round. Heaven is a sphere that surrounds it. Sink where you will. God is a Red Cross man with a dredge and a respiration-pump who's waiting for you at the opposite periphery. "
Toomer was a black man who passed as white (according to census records evidenced in this copy). While writing this book, he enlisted help from well-known African-American writers like Alain Locke and Claude McKay. He also attended literary gatherings in Harlem. Unlike his African-American colleagues, however, he could also attend white literary gatherings. Once Cane was published to much acclaim, Toomer hated when writers (like Waldo Frank) referred to him as a black man in their reviews of his book. He did not want to be given a race and felt that "a portrait of him as a Negro in the literary circles of New York" had been constructed. He eventually stopped marketing his book. The book didn't sell well, but made a literary mark and was printed in a second edition.
I wonder how, with all the references to race and n-words, with the sacred vernacular of Afro-American life, with those very intimate portrayals of black people, how could anyone read this, or want to read it, if they did not think it was written by a black writer? I may not love the poetry in Cane, but I admire the lyric in the prose. For instance, I always pause at the simple complexity in this sentence from Fern:"Face flowed into her eyes." The fragmented style of writing and the character portraits produce poignancy of people and place. Those who love drama may want to first turn to "Kabnis."
I could use layers of perspective, he told me. So I pulled this book from my shelf and highlighted sections. Then I pulled my copy of The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke (one of my favorite writers from that period), and highlighted William Braithwaite's excellent essay, "The Negro in American Literature" where he notes: "Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and flame, of ecstasy and pain..." To give a personal look at Toomer and the discussion around the writing and controversial publishing of Cane, I referenced sections of Langston Hughes' The Big Sea and highlighted sections of Henry Louis Gates' Afterword in this copy.
Jean Toomer was the first writer of the twenties to encapsulate black peasant life. Having lived in Georgia, I'm familiar with the Sparta he writes about and in most instances, the portrait remains the same. It is said that Ernest Gaines finds that he and Toomer shared a similar commitment to writing about the lives of black farmers. Cane, with its singular structure of poetry, prose and drama, contributed significantly to Afro-American modernism. Toomer referred to it as his "swan-song," the "song of an end." He was trying to record a fading art form that would transition during the first part of the twentieth century:
"The earth is round. Heaven is a sphere that surrounds it. Sink where you will. God is a Red Cross man with a dredge and a respiration-pump who's waiting for you at the opposite periphery. "
Toomer was a black man who passed as white (according to census records evidenced in this copy). While writing this book, he enlisted help from well-known African-American writers like Alain Locke and Claude McKay. He also attended literary gatherings in Harlem. Unlike his African-American colleagues, however, he could also attend white literary gatherings. Once Cane was published to much acclaim, Toomer hated when writers (like Waldo Frank) referred to him as a black man in their reviews of his book. He did not want to be given a race and felt that "a portrait of him as a Negro in the literary circles of New York" had been constructed. He eventually stopped marketing his book. The book didn't sell well, but made a literary mark and was printed in a second edition.
I wonder how, with all the references to race and n-words, with the sacred vernacular of Afro-American life, with those very intimate portrayals of black people, how could anyone read this, or want to read it, if they did not think it was written by a black writer? I may not love the poetry in Cane, but I admire the lyric in the prose. For instance, I always pause at the simple complexity in this sentence from Fern:"Face flowed into her eyes." The fragmented style of writing and the character portraits produce poignancy of people and place. Those who love drama may want to first turn to "Kabnis."
December 25, 2022
As a writer, Jean Toomer was an experimenter and an innovator. His style intertwines poetry and prose in such a way that one flows in and out of the other. For me, Cane reads like improvisational jazz; there is often a repetition of verse that sounds more like song than soliloquy.
Nowhere is Toomer’s influence more readily apparent than in the work of Langston Hughes. Cane is a precursor to Langston’s The Ways of White Folks - the two complement each other so well that they very nearly read like volume 1 and volume 2 of the same narrative. On the other hand, Toomer’s characters seem much less stereotyped, much less binary, and perhaps, consequently, much less commercial. That may explain why almost everyone has heard of Langston Hughes and almost no one has heard of Jean Toomer.
Nowhere is Toomer’s influence more readily apparent than in the work of Langston Hughes. Cane is a precursor to Langston’s The Ways of White Folks - the two complement each other so well that they very nearly read like volume 1 and volume 2 of the same narrative. On the other hand, Toomer’s characters seem much less stereotyped, much less binary, and perhaps, consequently, much less commercial. That may explain why almost everyone has heard of Langston Hughes and almost no one has heard of Jean Toomer.
July 7, 2021
Respect and admiration are the first two words that come to mind when I consider what Jean Toomer did with Cane.
Cane is innovative and experimental. Filled with beautiful imagery and language. Cohesive themes to compliment it's not all times cohesive, yet not all times jumbled, structure. A structure that was ahead it's time, and is still ahead of our time. I can safely say, from the few fiction books that I've read in my lifetime, that there is no one that I've read who is putting a novel, if you will, together the way that Jean Toomer put Cane together.
The most fascinating thing about this novel is that it has become the first novel that I've labeled—which Toomer would probably hate—as "autobiographical in structure." Toomer was a man who did everything in his power to avoid being placed in boxes—especially if said box was a "race" box. He did everything in his power to make sure that his sole novel, published in 1923, couldn't be boxed, which surely explains why he included vignettes, stories, songs, poems, and even a drama within the world of Cane.
Ultimately—even with all of the high qualities that Cane possesses which results in many a reader throwing respectful and admirable remarks towards it—I didn't care. I had to work too hard to try and enjoy this book. I read it, then went back and listened to the audio version available on Spotify. Too many occasions occurred where I wondered if there was something better I could be doing with my time. A thought that typically occurs right before I'll DNF a book.
I'm glad to have given Cane a chance, but I'm probably more satisfied to be able to say that this novel is behind me. Perhaps my current relationship with Cane is the prime example of wrong time and place; A textbook case of Wrong Reader + Wrong Book = No compatibility.
Maybe some months, or even years away from each other will make our hearts grow fonder. Maybe next time our relationship will be 5 stars.
Cane is innovative and experimental. Filled with beautiful imagery and language. Cohesive themes to compliment it's not all times cohesive, yet not all times jumbled, structure. A structure that was ahead it's time, and is still ahead of our time. I can safely say, from the few fiction books that I've read in my lifetime, that there is no one that I've read who is putting a novel, if you will, together the way that Jean Toomer put Cane together.
The most fascinating thing about this novel is that it has become the first novel that I've labeled—which Toomer would probably hate—as "autobiographical in structure." Toomer was a man who did everything in his power to avoid being placed in boxes—especially if said box was a "race" box. He did everything in his power to make sure that his sole novel, published in 1923, couldn't be boxed, which surely explains why he included vignettes, stories, songs, poems, and even a drama within the world of Cane.
Ultimately—even with all of the high qualities that Cane possesses which results in many a reader throwing respectful and admirable remarks towards it—I didn't care. I had to work too hard to try and enjoy this book. I read it, then went back and listened to the audio version available on Spotify. Too many occasions occurred where I wondered if there was something better I could be doing with my time. A thought that typically occurs right before I'll DNF a book.
I'm glad to have given Cane a chance, but I'm probably more satisfied to be able to say that this novel is behind me. Perhaps my current relationship with Cane is the prime example of wrong time and place; A textbook case of Wrong Reader + Wrong Book = No compatibility.
Maybe some months, or even years away from each other will make our hearts grow fonder. Maybe next time our relationship will be 5 stars.
November 12, 2020
Cane was a lyric essence forced out with great effort despite my knotted state. People have remarked its simply--easy flowing lyricism, its rich natural poetry; and they may assume that it came to bloom as easily as a flower. In truth, it was born in an agony of internal tightness, conflict, and chaos. It is true that some portions, after I had cleared the way, came forth fluently. . . . But the book as a whole was somehow distilled from the most terrible strain I have ever known. . . . The feelings were in me, deep and mobile enough. But the creations of the forms were very difficult. During its writing and after it, I [felt] that I had by sheer force emptied myself and given to that book my last blood. - Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer's landmark 1920s novel's experimental and episodic, sometimes difficult to follow, at times it seems Toomer's more interested in evoking an emotional or aesthetic response or in creating a series of impressions for readers to contemplate than he is in telling any kind of conventional story. So it didn't surprise me to find that sections were originally published in avant-garde, literary journals notably Broom and The Little Review.These were publications that typically featured writers like Virginia Woolf, suggesting that Toomer, who's now routinely associated with the Harlem Renaissance, was also strongly linked to the development of modernist styles of writing - there's a possibility that aspects of his work influenced Woolf's later more abstract narratives.
Toomer didn't see himself as a 'black' writer, at times he actively resisted that label. He was biracial, clearly deeply conflicted about his identity and his literary allegiances, often more explicitly interested in modernism than in exploring America's deep racial rifts and prejudices. Yet Cane with its play on genre boundaries and its fascinating mix of prose and poetic styles, is also a powerful representation of the trauma of living as a black person in a racist America. The numerous vignettes that make up the novel centre on black culture and black communities, their world is dangerous, brutal, full of threats that seep into every aspect of their existence, like the beautiful braided hair of a local woman that Toomer compares to a lynch mob's rope. There's a visceral immediacy in much of Toomer's book, particularly the passages set in a small town in Georgia, conveyed in scenes of lust, brutality, heartrending grief and the portrayal of dreams of a better life that will clearly never bear fruit.
Toomer's adept at conveying the fragility and violence of everyday existence for his characters, as well as their continuing strength and determination not to be defined by the racism they encounter, not to be reduced to little more than victims. Despite its challenging structure I found this surprisingly readable. Although, apart from the Georgia sections, I often found it hard to directly connect to Toomer's words, there's an unevenness, a lack of balance that detracts at times from Cane's sense and force, sometimes overblown, hyperbolic, and sometimes almost wilfully archaic and awkward. This isn't a book I can say I liked or even always admired - the portrayal of women here is particularly problematic - yet I was often gripped by it, at its best it's a haunting, impressive depiction of the experiences of Black Americans living in a particularly turbulent time and place.
Jean Toomer's landmark 1920s novel's experimental and episodic, sometimes difficult to follow, at times it seems Toomer's more interested in evoking an emotional or aesthetic response or in creating a series of impressions for readers to contemplate than he is in telling any kind of conventional story. So it didn't surprise me to find that sections were originally published in avant-garde, literary journals notably Broom and The Little Review.These were publications that typically featured writers like Virginia Woolf, suggesting that Toomer, who's now routinely associated with the Harlem Renaissance, was also strongly linked to the development of modernist styles of writing - there's a possibility that aspects of his work influenced Woolf's later more abstract narratives.
Toomer didn't see himself as a 'black' writer, at times he actively resisted that label. He was biracial, clearly deeply conflicted about his identity and his literary allegiances, often more explicitly interested in modernism than in exploring America's deep racial rifts and prejudices. Yet Cane with its play on genre boundaries and its fascinating mix of prose and poetic styles, is also a powerful representation of the trauma of living as a black person in a racist America. The numerous vignettes that make up the novel centre on black culture and black communities, their world is dangerous, brutal, full of threats that seep into every aspect of their existence, like the beautiful braided hair of a local woman that Toomer compares to a lynch mob's rope. There's a visceral immediacy in much of Toomer's book, particularly the passages set in a small town in Georgia, conveyed in scenes of lust, brutality, heartrending grief and the portrayal of dreams of a better life that will clearly never bear fruit.
Toomer's adept at conveying the fragility and violence of everyday existence for his characters, as well as their continuing strength and determination not to be defined by the racism they encounter, not to be reduced to little more than victims. Despite its challenging structure I found this surprisingly readable. Although, apart from the Georgia sections, I often found it hard to directly connect to Toomer's words, there's an unevenness, a lack of balance that detracts at times from Cane's sense and force, sometimes overblown, hyperbolic, and sometimes almost wilfully archaic and awkward. This isn't a book I can say I liked or even always admired - the portrayal of women here is particularly problematic - yet I was often gripped by it, at its best it's a haunting, impressive depiction of the experiences of Black Americans living in a particularly turbulent time and place.
April 19, 2015
Powerful and poetic vignettes of blacks in rural Georgia and immigrants to the Washington D.C. area near the turn of the 20th century. We feel their daily integration with their mind-numbing, dusty work in the cane fields or saw mills and feel their struggle against internalized forms of racism and sexism. In the urban environment, we feel their mix of hopes for promised freedom and of their alienation and despair of continual poverty. Some find a connection in churches to the values from their rural origins while others seethe with anger and jealousies and get in trouble or numb themselves with drink. The rise of the jazz age call some to other avenues of hope and make a backdrop for others haunted by forbidden interracial lust.
Toomer’s capturing of the rhythms of speech by ordinary people is a marvel that feels to me the equal of the more prolific fellow member of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes. It was a bit of a surprise to experience his sensitivity in portraying women in his first six stories. I admire the adaptation of repetitive call and response schemes common to the Baptist church. One story begins and ends with the haunting refrain:
Betty was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She’s dead; they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound.
The poems placed between narratives make for moving or shocking interludes. For example, two poems frame a story of a black housekeeper who is courted by the white son of her employer. Jealousy on the part of a black admirer leads to a fight ending with the white getting his throat cut and the victor getting burned up in an old cotton factory by a white mob.
u>Portrait in Georgia
Hair—braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope
Eyes--fagots
Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters
Breath—the last sweet scent of cane
And her slim body white as the ash
of black flesh after flame
The following incantation is repeated three times with the story of the tragedy:
Red nigger moon. Sinner!
Blood-burning moon—Sinner!
Come out that fact’ry door.
I see why this work is considered a seminal voice in American literature. Although this book is typically identified as “black literature”, Toomer himself, whose mixed blood allowed him often to “pass” as a white, once advocated for a broader view in a letter to a magazine:
“From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have strived for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling. Without denying a single element in me, I have sought to let them function as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony. Within the last two or three years however, my growing need for artistic expression as pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. …Now I cannot see myself as aloof and separated. My point of view has not changed; it has deepened, it has widened.
Toomer’s capturing of the rhythms of speech by ordinary people is a marvel that feels to me the equal of the more prolific fellow member of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes. It was a bit of a surprise to experience his sensitivity in portraying women in his first six stories. I admire the adaptation of repetitive call and response schemes common to the Baptist church. One story begins and ends with the haunting refrain:
Betty was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She’s dead; they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound.
The poems placed between narratives make for moving or shocking interludes. For example, two poems frame a story of a black housekeeper who is courted by the white son of her employer. Jealousy on the part of a black admirer leads to a fight ending with the white getting his throat cut and the victor getting burned up in an old cotton factory by a white mob.
u>Portrait in Georgia
Hair—braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope
Eyes--fagots
Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters
Breath—the last sweet scent of cane
And her slim body white as the ash
of black flesh after flame
The following incantation is repeated three times with the story of the tragedy:
Red nigger moon. Sinner!
Blood-burning moon—Sinner!
Come out that fact’ry door.
I see why this work is considered a seminal voice in American literature. Although this book is typically identified as “black literature”, Toomer himself, whose mixed blood allowed him often to “pass” as a white, once advocated for a broader view in a letter to a magazine:
“From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have strived for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling. Without denying a single element in me, I have sought to let them function as complements. I have tried to let them live in harmony. Within the last two or three years however, my growing need for artistic expression as pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. …Now I cannot see myself as aloof and separated. My point of view has not changed; it has deepened, it has widened.
January 30, 2015
An astonishingly beautiful, sensual, lyrical, formally experimental book. In character vignettes of one, two, three pages interleaved with short poems, Toomer explores the lives of black people, mostly in the rural south, specifically a tiny hamlet dominated by a sawmill (marked mostly by smells and sounds), sugar cane fields and pines, the timeseason--autumn, the time, dusk. In fact, every story in this collection could be called 'Dusk'--with all its overtones. Though largely rural, a couple of the portraits are of city people--and though Toomer was associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the city is Washington DC, where Toomer grew up, a weird liminal zone between North and South.
A man of mixed race, son of prominent people back several generations, an interesting American tale in itself, he struggled with America's sense of categorization of race. Toomer was a very complex person and his portraits are equally complex, and extremely poetic. He didn't write much after Cane, and spiritual quests occupied much of his life. He followed Gurdjieff, he was a Quaker, he corresponded with Edgar Cayce, and even studied Scientology. A restless seeker, he was a subtle and questioning man, and Cane is a tour de force.
Here's a lyric passage in a piece called "Blood-Burning Moon":
"Up from the deep dusk of a cleared spot on th edge of the forest a mellow glow arose and spread fan-wise into the low-hanging heavens. And all around the air was heavy with the scent of boiling cane. A large pile of cane-stalks lay like ribboned shadows upon the ground. A mule, harnessed to a pole, grudged lazily round and round the pivot of the grinder. Beneath a swaying oil lamp, a Negro alternately whipped out at the mule,and fed cane-stalks to the grinder. A fat boy waddled pails of fresh ground juice between the grinder and the boiling stove. Steam came from the copper boiling pan. The scene of cane came from the copper pan and drenched the forest and the hill that sloped to factory town, beneath its fragrance It drenched the men in circle seated around the stove. Some chewed at the white pulp of stalks, but there was no need for them to., if all they wanted was to taste the cane. One tasted it in factory town. And from factory town one could see the soft haze thrown by the glowing stove upon the low-hanging heavens."
Here's a passage from 'Fern': (my favorite story)
"We walked down the Pike with people on all the porches gaping at us. "Doesnt it make you mad?" She meant the row of petty gossiping people. She meant the world. Through a canebrake that was ripe for cutting, the branch was reached. Under a sweet-gum tree, and where reddish leaves had dammed the creek a little, we sat down. Dusk, suggesting the almost imperceptible procession of giant trees, settled with a purpose haze about the cane. I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had vision. People have them in Georgia more often than you would suppose. A black woman once saw the mother of Christ and drew her in charcoal on the courthouse wall [this drawing appears in other stories]… When one is on the soil of one's ancestors, most anything can come to one…"
A man of mixed race, son of prominent people back several generations, an interesting American tale in itself, he struggled with America's sense of categorization of race. Toomer was a very complex person and his portraits are equally complex, and extremely poetic. He didn't write much after Cane, and spiritual quests occupied much of his life. He followed Gurdjieff, he was a Quaker, he corresponded with Edgar Cayce, and even studied Scientology. A restless seeker, he was a subtle and questioning man, and Cane is a tour de force.
Here's a lyric passage in a piece called "Blood-Burning Moon":
"Up from the deep dusk of a cleared spot on th edge of the forest a mellow glow arose and spread fan-wise into the low-hanging heavens. And all around the air was heavy with the scent of boiling cane. A large pile of cane-stalks lay like ribboned shadows upon the ground. A mule, harnessed to a pole, grudged lazily round and round the pivot of the grinder. Beneath a swaying oil lamp, a Negro alternately whipped out at the mule,and fed cane-stalks to the grinder. A fat boy waddled pails of fresh ground juice between the grinder and the boiling stove. Steam came from the copper boiling pan. The scene of cane came from the copper pan and drenched the forest and the hill that sloped to factory town, beneath its fragrance It drenched the men in circle seated around the stove. Some chewed at the white pulp of stalks, but there was no need for them to., if all they wanted was to taste the cane. One tasted it in factory town. And from factory town one could see the soft haze thrown by the glowing stove upon the low-hanging heavens."
Here's a passage from 'Fern': (my favorite story)
"We walked down the Pike with people on all the porches gaping at us. "Doesnt it make you mad?" She meant the row of petty gossiping people. She meant the world. Through a canebrake that was ripe for cutting, the branch was reached. Under a sweet-gum tree, and where reddish leaves had dammed the creek a little, we sat down. Dusk, suggesting the almost imperceptible procession of giant trees, settled with a purpose haze about the cane. I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had vision. People have them in Georgia more often than you would suppose. A black woman once saw the mother of Christ and drew her in charcoal on the courthouse wall [this drawing appears in other stories]… When one is on the soil of one's ancestors, most anything can come to one…"
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April 5, 2017This is quite a brilliant, remarkable, and odd book that somehow no one told me personally that I should read. Why has the secret been kept? Okay, a recent check confirms that Bloom had it on his Western Canon list. But Toomer's just a name, how was I supposed to know he's actually good?
It is, to a large extent, a portrait of many of the horrors and a few of the beauties of small-town post-slavery but-still-gravely-unjust southern life from a black perspective. It's also an uncharaterizable amalgam of styles and modes, incorporating some lyric poetry, some straight narrative, some psychological insight, some expressionistic stuff, some borderline surrealism, all processed deftly by an innovative and masterly mind.
Somehow he works in such oddities as this:
...without throwing the novel into pure abstraction. Well, okay, but the whole "Rhobert" chapter is rather far-out, as far as far-out goes.
Here are some other little snippets I liked:
Now, it's fair to say there are a couple of chapters where the author may trip up a bit. Though I may not be able to say why, the chapter "Box Seat," seemed to go wrong in precisely the same way most of the other chapters went right. Just something in the way the pieces fit together felt more put on, or something like that. And another chapter too, fell perhaps a little below brilliance. But I reckon those are the kinds of stumbles that happen when you dare to take big risks as an author and aim at something both fantastic and grotesque. And I'm not so confident in my judgement that they were stumbles, rather than something that just rubbed me the wrong way as I suspect one part or another of this book is likely to rub any reader the wrong way, once in a while.
Don't let my hesitation detract from the overall message that this book is a phenomenon.
It is, to a large extent, a portrait of many of the horrors and a few of the beauties of small-town post-slavery but-still-gravely-unjust southern life from a black perspective. It's also an uncharaterizable amalgam of styles and modes, incorporating some lyric poetry, some straight narrative, some psychological insight, some expressionistic stuff, some borderline surrealism, all processed deftly by an innovative and masterly mind.
Somehow he works in such oddities as this:
"Her mind is a pink meshbag filled with baby toes,"
...without throwing the novel into pure abstraction. Well, okay, but the whole "Rhobert" chapter is rather far-out, as far as far-out goes.
Here are some other little snippets I liked:
"...words is like the spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there's times when they jes won't come."
"God, he doesn't exist, but nevertheless He is ugly."
"As he steps towards the others, he seems to be issuing sharply from a vivid dream."
"Th form that's burned int my soul is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, an wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words. God Almighty no. Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words."
Now, it's fair to say there are a couple of chapters where the author may trip up a bit. Though I may not be able to say why, the chapter "Box Seat," seemed to go wrong in precisely the same way most of the other chapters went right. Just something in the way the pieces fit together felt more put on, or something like that. And another chapter too, fell perhaps a little below brilliance. But I reckon those are the kinds of stumbles that happen when you dare to take big risks as an author and aim at something both fantastic and grotesque. And I'm not so confident in my judgement that they were stumbles, rather than something that just rubbed me the wrong way as I suspect one part or another of this book is likely to rub any reader the wrong way, once in a while.
Don't let my hesitation detract from the overall message that this book is a phenomenon.
April 2, 2018
"Karintha is a woman. Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon. They will bring their money; they will die not having found it out...Karintha at twenty, carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Karintha..." This book is a structurally-inventive mix of prose, poetry and drama with beautiful language. This new edition also contains an essay about the question of race and the life and career of the mixed-race Toomer who was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and modernist literature.
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March 8, 2023
"Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them."
Jean Toomer's Cane wasn't the first work of fiction published by an American author of African descent (I'm phrasing it that way for a reason, which I'll get to later), but it was a watershed book which can fairly be said to have laid the foundation for the African American novel as we now know it. While some of the names remain familiar, few readers outside of university programs are likely to have encountered the fiction of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, or Hannah Crafts—all pre-Cane writers. The Black novelists who are widely read today—Larsen, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and so on—all published their fiction in a post-Cane world.
That's an odd fact, because Cane doesn't read like the start of anything. Usually the earliest examples from an artistic tradition will have a certain rudimentary feel: Beowulf is important, but it's not exactly a nuanced study of the human condition. Cane, on the other hand, is complex, intricate, layered, referential, experimental; it's definitely commenting on earlier depictions of Black life, but it also feels like it could be deconstructing works which were still years in the future, like Their Eyes Were Watching God. It mixes genres, forms, styles, settings, and characters completely unapologetically, trusting the reader to keep up—or not. It has passages of lofty poetry but also isn't afraid to be blasphemous, violent, vulgar, or sexually explicit. Even the characters' names—Karintha, Carma, Cloine, Kabnis—sound like they belong in either a Greek myth or a sci-fi series. In short, Cane is an extremely modern work, or more accurately a Modernist one.
But Toomer wasn't just grafting a pre-formed Modernist sensibility onto Black literature—he was also right at the forefront of the Modernist movement itself. Cane was published in 1923. Ulysses and The Waste Land had come out only the year before. Virginia Woolf's major novels had yet to be published, and William Faulkner—who, naturally, gets all the credit for applying a Modernist lens to Southern American society—hadn't published at all. This passage from Cane's original foreword by Waldo Frank sounds just like the sort of thing that usually gets written about Faulkner:
Wisely, Toomer doesn't plunge his reader straight into his most difficult material. The first section of the book is a series of vignettes of Black life in and around the sugarcane fields of rural Georgia, with prose meditations (only a few could really be called "stories") interspersed with poems and songs. This is the most traditional-feeling section of the book, both in terms of its fairly direct prose and its familiar, though often quite grim, subject matter. In the second section we jump without warning both to a new setting—the northern, urban, less overtly segregated worlds of Washington, D.C. and Chicago—and to a much denser stream-of-consciousness style. I found this the hardest section to follow, but the stream-of-consciousness also lends the characters here much more interiority than those in the Georgia section, which in turn makes them feel a little more real and less like literary archetypes. Finally, the third (and my favorite) section synthesizes these two modes, in the form of a long and obviously-autobiographical narrative about a Black northerner who has come to teach in the South, as Toomer himself briefly did. The format here becomes something like a stage play, blending colloquial dialogue with more dreamlike poetic soliloquies; it's more experimental that the earlier Georgia section, but more straightforward than the northern episodes.
I've tried to give a sense of Cane's various modes, but you really can't understand how much variety there truly is here without reading some sample passages. We go from workmanlike prose:
To imitations of spirituals and work songs:
To more formal or experimental poems:
To prose poetry:
To Joycean stream-of-consciousness:
To phonetic dialogue:
To something almost Shakespearean:
All of which is to say that Cane is a pretty obviously remarkable book. Nevertheless, it can be a challenging one to engage with as a reader. All of that register-shifting is a little disorienting, especially since there's no obvious throughline in the form of recurring characters or references. (That being the case, it does seem a little misleading to call this a "novel" rather than a sort of collection or compilation.) The subject matter is at least as challenging as the style, with plenty of discussion of lynchings, segregation, poverty, illegitimacy, alcoholism, religious hypocrisy, and any number of other abuses and social ills. Women play a central role throughout the book, but almost exclusively as objects of thwarted desire by sexually-frustrated and embittered men—no one would ever classify this as a "feminist" text. And in general, the characters who most resemble Jean Toomer—i.e. educated, light-skinned biracial men—tend to be the ones who receive the richest and most convincing characterization. At its best points I found Cane musical and hypnotic, but like so much Modernist writing it still registered more in my head than in my heart.
Cane is a textbook example of a complicated work which mirrors the contradictions of its complicated writer. At the beginning of this review I called Toomer "an American author of African descent" rather than simply "Black" or "African American." That's because Toomer himself, who was biracial and ambiguous in appearance, usually refused to identify directly with Blackness—he preferred to call himself simply "American." He was a manifestly brilliant and courageous artist, and yet after Cane (hailed by critics at the time as a promising start by a 28-year-old newcomer) he hardly wrote again, especially about race. He spent most of his remaining 47 years exploring the teachings of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff and then of Quakerism, with brief dabblings in Jungian psychology, spirtualism, and Scientology. Maybe he found his peace, but as a reader it's hard not to be disappointed by such an end to this particular life.
Looking back at Cane with these biographical details in mind, I notice that nearly every story here grapples with the impossibility of dividing Black from white in American life, with all of the most Toomer-esque characters almost completely consumed by anger, self-loathing, and desire for the simpler lifestyles they can't possess. Religion provides them no relief, and community very little. It's a bleak picture, but just as Toomer's life seems to explain his book, I think his book also explains much about his life.
In a better world than this one, I wonder what else he may have written.
Jean Toomer's Cane wasn't the first work of fiction published by an American author of African descent (I'm phrasing it that way for a reason, which I'll get to later), but it was a watershed book which can fairly be said to have laid the foundation for the African American novel as we now know it. While some of the names remain familiar, few readers outside of university programs are likely to have encountered the fiction of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, or Hannah Crafts—all pre-Cane writers. The Black novelists who are widely read today—Larsen, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and so on—all published their fiction in a post-Cane world.
That's an odd fact, because Cane doesn't read like the start of anything. Usually the earliest examples from an artistic tradition will have a certain rudimentary feel: Beowulf is important, but it's not exactly a nuanced study of the human condition. Cane, on the other hand, is complex, intricate, layered, referential, experimental; it's definitely commenting on earlier depictions of Black life, but it also feels like it could be deconstructing works which were still years in the future, like Their Eyes Were Watching God. It mixes genres, forms, styles, settings, and characters completely unapologetically, trusting the reader to keep up—or not. It has passages of lofty poetry but also isn't afraid to be blasphemous, violent, vulgar, or sexually explicit. Even the characters' names—Karintha, Carma, Cloine, Kabnis—sound like they belong in either a Greek myth or a sci-fi series. In short, Cane is an extremely modern work, or more accurately a Modernist one.
But Toomer wasn't just grafting a pre-formed Modernist sensibility onto Black literature—he was also right at the forefront of the Modernist movement itself. Cane was published in 1923. Ulysses and The Waste Land had come out only the year before. Virginia Woolf's major novels had yet to be published, and William Faulkner—who, naturally, gets all the credit for applying a Modernist lens to Southern American society—hadn't published at all. This passage from Cane's original foreword by Waldo Frank sounds just like the sort of thing that usually gets written about Faulkner:
It seems to me, therefore, that this is a first book in more ways than one. It is a harbinger of the South's literary maturity: of its emergence from the obsession put upon its minds by the unending racial crisis—an obsession from which writers have made their indirect escape through sentimentalism, exoticism, polemic, "problem" fiction, and moral melodrama. It marks the dawn of direct and unafraid creation.
Wisely, Toomer doesn't plunge his reader straight into his most difficult material. The first section of the book is a series of vignettes of Black life in and around the sugarcane fields of rural Georgia, with prose meditations (only a few could really be called "stories") interspersed with poems and songs. This is the most traditional-feeling section of the book, both in terms of its fairly direct prose and its familiar, though often quite grim, subject matter. In the second section we jump without warning both to a new setting—the northern, urban, less overtly segregated worlds of Washington, D.C. and Chicago—and to a much denser stream-of-consciousness style. I found this the hardest section to follow, but the stream-of-consciousness also lends the characters here much more interiority than those in the Georgia section, which in turn makes them feel a little more real and less like literary archetypes. Finally, the third (and my favorite) section synthesizes these two modes, in the form of a long and obviously-autobiographical narrative about a Black northerner who has come to teach in the South, as Toomer himself briefly did. The format here becomes something like a stage play, blending colloquial dialogue with more dreamlike poetic soliloquies; it's more experimental that the earlier Georgia section, but more straightforward than the northern episodes.
I've tried to give a sense of Cane's various modes, but you really can't understand how much variety there truly is here without reading some sample passages. We go from workmanlike prose:
Carma, in overalls, and strong as any man, stands behind the old brown mule, driving the wagon home. It bumps, and groans, and shakes as it crosses the railroad track.
To imitations of spirituals and work songs:
God’s body's got a soul,
Bodies like to roll the soul,
Cant blame God if we dont roll,
Come, brother, roll, roll!
To more formal or experimental poems:
A spray of pine-needles,
Dipped in western horizon gold,
Fell onto a path.
Dry moulds of cow-hoofs.
In the forest.
Rabbits knew not of their falling,
Nor did the forest catch aflame.
To prose poetry:
It is a healthy pink the blue of evening tints a purple pallor.
To Joycean stream-of-consciousness:
Never see Dan again. He makes me feel queer. Starts things he doesnt finish. Upsets me. I am not upset. I am perfectly calm. I am going to enjoy the show. Good show. I've had some show! This damn tame thing. O Dan.
To phonetic dialogue:
An oh, I came near fergettin, brother, but Mr. Marmon—he was eatin lunch when I saw him—told me t tell y that th lumber wagon busted down an he wanted y t fix it fer him.
To something almost Shakespearean:
Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, flame of the great season's multicolored leaves, tarnished, burned.
All of which is to say that Cane is a pretty obviously remarkable book. Nevertheless, it can be a challenging one to engage with as a reader. All of that register-shifting is a little disorienting, especially since there's no obvious throughline in the form of recurring characters or references. (That being the case, it does seem a little misleading to call this a "novel" rather than a sort of collection or compilation.) The subject matter is at least as challenging as the style, with plenty of discussion of lynchings, segregation, poverty, illegitimacy, alcoholism, religious hypocrisy, and any number of other abuses and social ills. Women play a central role throughout the book, but almost exclusively as objects of thwarted desire by sexually-frustrated and embittered men—no one would ever classify this as a "feminist" text. And in general, the characters who most resemble Jean Toomer—i.e. educated, light-skinned biracial men—tend to be the ones who receive the richest and most convincing characterization. At its best points I found Cane musical and hypnotic, but like so much Modernist writing it still registered more in my head than in my heart.
Cane is a textbook example of a complicated work which mirrors the contradictions of its complicated writer. At the beginning of this review I called Toomer "an American author of African descent" rather than simply "Black" or "African American." That's because Toomer himself, who was biracial and ambiguous in appearance, usually refused to identify directly with Blackness—he preferred to call himself simply "American." He was a manifestly brilliant and courageous artist, and yet after Cane (hailed by critics at the time as a promising start by a 28-year-old newcomer) he hardly wrote again, especially about race. He spent most of his remaining 47 years exploring the teachings of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff and then of Quakerism, with brief dabblings in Jungian psychology, spirtualism, and Scientology. Maybe he found his peace, but as a reader it's hard not to be disappointed by such an end to this particular life.
Looking back at Cane with these biographical details in mind, I notice that nearly every story here grapples with the impossibility of dividing Black from white in American life, with all of the most Toomer-esque characters almost completely consumed by anger, self-loathing, and desire for the simpler lifestyles they can't possess. Religion provides them no relief, and community very little. It's a bleak picture, but just as Toomer's life seems to explain his book, I think his book also explains much about his life.
In a better world than this one, I wonder what else he may have written.
February 21, 2024
Jean Toomer's Cane
Jean Toomer's "Cane" (1933) is one of the lesser-known masterworks of American literature. An enigmatic figure, Toomer (1894 -- 1967) wrote "Cane" at the age of 27 and never published another novel, assuming that "Cane" itself can loosely be so described. The book frequently is described as initiating the Harlem Renaissance, even though Toomer did not live in Harlem when it was written and nothing in "Cane" is set there.
"Cane" is a difficult, modernistic book that resists easy summarization. It is a mixture of poetry, short stories and vignettes, and closet-drama. The book is in three sections, with the first set in a rural community in northeast Georgia while the middle section is set in African American neighborhoods of Washington D.C., and in Chicago. The third section returns to a small Georgia community. The writing is tight, imagistic, and suggestive. The book lacks plot and linear development. The unity the book has derives from allusiveness and from related themes.
Raised by an upper-middle class Washington, D.C. African American family, Toomer was a wanderer and a seeker. In 1922, he received an offer to teach at a rural school in Georgia for African Americans. This experience, his first exposure to rural African American life, resulted in "Cane". The book has a strong autobiographical flavor and an intensity which results from an overwhelming experience of discovering something for the first time.
Readers may differ about the main themes of "Cane". It discusses African American life, but in a form that was changing and passing away even as Toomer wrote about it. Toomer portrays rural southern African American life while contrasting it with developing In its portrayal of women and men and the different ways they understand sexuality, the book has a strong erotic component. The book also describes lonely, isolated people of both genders and different races who show an inability to make connections with others. While there are many realistic descriptive passages in "Cane", the predominant tone is one of mysticism. (In later life, Toomer became, successively, a student of Eastern religion, a follower of the Russian spiritual teacher Gurdjieff, and a Quaker.)
The first section of the book features six short stories set in Georgia interspersed with poems which illuminate them. Each of the stories focus on a different young woman and on the nature of her sexual experiences with men. Among other things, the stories show how men and women differ in their view of physical sexuality. The stories are raw, elliptical, and absorbing.
The second section of "Cane" opens with an impressionistic description of Georgia Avenue, a major African American thoroughfare in Washington, D.C. There is another combination of poetry and short stories, which tend to be slightly more elaborate than the stories in the first part. The stories suggest that African American migration to cities came at the cost of a loss of spontaneity and zest for life. Several of the stories have themes about sexual relationships between men and women that expand upon the earlier part.
The third and most difficult part of "Cane" is a short story in the form of a closet-drama, called "Kabinis". The primary character, Ralph Kabnis, shares traits with Toomer in that he is a northern African American who takes a job teaching in an African American rural Georgia school. Kabnis has difficulty understanding his new surroundings. As the story develops, he meets local African American men, an outsider who shares some of his own traits, and a series of young women, ranging from the innocent to prostitutes. There is also a mysterious, elderly, prophetic figure. The story is highly atmospheric and descriptive as Kabnis at the end comes to a degree of understanding of himself and of the southern African American experience.
In later autobiographical writings, Toomer offered the following observations about "Cane" and about why he never wrote a successor work. After describing the tension even in rural Georgia between traditional life and the pull towards urbanization, Toomer wrote:
"The folk spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end. And why no one has seen that or felt that, why people have expected me to write a second and a third and a fourth book like Cane, is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life."
"Cane" brings an immediate emotional impact to the reader, while still demanding to be read slowly and carefully and pondered. I have used a Norton Critical Edition of "Cane" which includes valuable commentaries and critical articles, including Toomer's autobiographical writing quoted above. Toomer's novel also is available in a Library of America volume devoted to African American novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Lovers of American literature will want to get to know Toomer's seminal work.
Robin Friedman
Jean Toomer's "Cane" (1933) is one of the lesser-known masterworks of American literature. An enigmatic figure, Toomer (1894 -- 1967) wrote "Cane" at the age of 27 and never published another novel, assuming that "Cane" itself can loosely be so described. The book frequently is described as initiating the Harlem Renaissance, even though Toomer did not live in Harlem when it was written and nothing in "Cane" is set there.
"Cane" is a difficult, modernistic book that resists easy summarization. It is a mixture of poetry, short stories and vignettes, and closet-drama. The book is in three sections, with the first set in a rural community in northeast Georgia while the middle section is set in African American neighborhoods of Washington D.C., and in Chicago. The third section returns to a small Georgia community. The writing is tight, imagistic, and suggestive. The book lacks plot and linear development. The unity the book has derives from allusiveness and from related themes.
Raised by an upper-middle class Washington, D.C. African American family, Toomer was a wanderer and a seeker. In 1922, he received an offer to teach at a rural school in Georgia for African Americans. This experience, his first exposure to rural African American life, resulted in "Cane". The book has a strong autobiographical flavor and an intensity which results from an overwhelming experience of discovering something for the first time.
Readers may differ about the main themes of "Cane". It discusses African American life, but in a form that was changing and passing away even as Toomer wrote about it. Toomer portrays rural southern African American life while contrasting it with developing In its portrayal of women and men and the different ways they understand sexuality, the book has a strong erotic component. The book also describes lonely, isolated people of both genders and different races who show an inability to make connections with others. While there are many realistic descriptive passages in "Cane", the predominant tone is one of mysticism. (In later life, Toomer became, successively, a student of Eastern religion, a follower of the Russian spiritual teacher Gurdjieff, and a Quaker.)
The first section of the book features six short stories set in Georgia interspersed with poems which illuminate them. Each of the stories focus on a different young woman and on the nature of her sexual experiences with men. Among other things, the stories show how men and women differ in their view of physical sexuality. The stories are raw, elliptical, and absorbing.
The second section of "Cane" opens with an impressionistic description of Georgia Avenue, a major African American thoroughfare in Washington, D.C. There is another combination of poetry and short stories, which tend to be slightly more elaborate than the stories in the first part. The stories suggest that African American migration to cities came at the cost of a loss of spontaneity and zest for life. Several of the stories have themes about sexual relationships between men and women that expand upon the earlier part.
The third and most difficult part of "Cane" is a short story in the form of a closet-drama, called "Kabinis". The primary character, Ralph Kabnis, shares traits with Toomer in that he is a northern African American who takes a job teaching in an African American rural Georgia school. Kabnis has difficulty understanding his new surroundings. As the story develops, he meets local African American men, an outsider who shares some of his own traits, and a series of young women, ranging from the innocent to prostitutes. There is also a mysterious, elderly, prophetic figure. The story is highly atmospheric and descriptive as Kabnis at the end comes to a degree of understanding of himself and of the southern African American experience.
In later autobiographical writings, Toomer offered the following observations about "Cane" and about why he never wrote a successor work. After describing the tension even in rural Georgia between traditional life and the pull towards urbanization, Toomer wrote:
"The folk spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end. And why no one has seen that or felt that, why people have expected me to write a second and a third and a fourth book like Cane, is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life."
"Cane" brings an immediate emotional impact to the reader, while still demanding to be read slowly and carefully and pondered. I have used a Norton Critical Edition of "Cane" which includes valuable commentaries and critical articles, including Toomer's autobiographical writing quoted above. Toomer's novel also is available in a Library of America volume devoted to African American novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Lovers of American literature will want to get to know Toomer's seminal work.
Robin Friedman
December 20, 2018
Jean Toomer’s Cane was published in a small edition in 1923. Despite favourable reviews, Cane was not reprinted until 1927. For the next forty years, it remained out of print. Like a nova, Toomer’s literary career exploded into brilliance with Cane, then faded from the view of all but the few who continuously scanned the literary galaxy. Cane proved to be a swan wong, not only, as Toomer believed, for the folk culture but also for his own writing career, as he only published one small book afterwards. No matter what it may have been for him, Cane still sings to readers, not the swan song of an era that was dying, but the morning hymn of a Renaissance that was beginning.
What became known as the “Negro Renaissance” (or “Harlem Renaissance”) was partly rooted in Cane. It evidenced racial pride in the feeling expressed by writers that they had to create without regard for stereotypical audience expectations if they were to understand the special experience of Black America. As Langston Hughes put it in a manifesto of the 1920’s: “If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.”
Toomer questioned the harmonies and values of his society. Cane is no conventional world of Black “primitives” or “exotics”. It is a montage: of women “ripened too soon”, impotized by the moral prescriptions of bourgeois society, transfixed into virgins and virgin-mothers by men who do not understand them, neuroticized by the tensions between their subconscious physical urges and their conscious conformity to society’s strictures against even the possibility of emotions—women who wail futilely against their society.
Cane is a world of men traumatised and destroyed by bigotry, men bent double by materialism, dreamers who cannot rouse themselves to action, men who rationalise their desires into idealised abstractions, men who cover in drink and sex to hide their fears, men who cannot afford help beyond that of material goods.
The theme of the first part is reinforced by the impressionistic style of narration that conveys the sensations of instinctual life as the narrator comes to feel them. With the second part that style is no longer functional for Toomer, because he believes the urban environment, in contrast to the world of cane and soil and pine, and the changing social experience cut people off from the sources of feeling and vitiate their spirit. Toomer, therefore, needs a style in the second part that covnveys the disintegration of collective and spontaneous life.
When Paul is at last ready to love, he insists upon talking about it to a doorman, assuring him that it is a genuine love, and thus donning spontaneity. When he returns from this self-conscious apology, Bona is already gone. Like Muriel and others in the world of Cane, Kabnis out of fear blocks the flow of spontaneous feeling.
It is also true, however, that consciously or subconsciously Toomer knew that he was visiting in the South. Thus, he could write sympathetically as one who feels kinship yet maintains artistic detachment. He desired merely to observe, to sense, and to reflect the milieu, not to change it. When he wrote of Washington and Chicago, however, he lost his detachment. He wanted to reform the people, to rid them of their indolence and their anxieties and their inhibitions. Consequently his tone became sharper, sardonic, satirical. Avey, he lamented, “is too much like a cow.” She lives by instinct, with few drives and fewer goals. Yet Toomer had not sat in judgment upon Karintha and Fern, who were also creatures of instinct. Toomer, one suspects, expected such behaviour from them—they were the Southern Blacks, “the children of nature”.
Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.It was an anticipation of what was to come later. Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel was published in 1934, eleven years after Cane. Richard Wright made his bow with Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938, fifteen years later. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison followed Toomer’s work by just thirty years. James Baldwin was not born when Toomer began to publish.
What became known as the “Negro Renaissance” (or “Harlem Renaissance”) was partly rooted in Cane. It evidenced racial pride in the feeling expressed by writers that they had to create without regard for stereotypical audience expectations if they were to understand the special experience of Black America. As Langston Hughes put it in a manifesto of the 1920’s: “If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.”
Toomer questioned the harmonies and values of his society. Cane is no conventional world of Black “primitives” or “exotics”. It is a montage: of women “ripened too soon”, impotized by the moral prescriptions of bourgeois society, transfixed into virgins and virgin-mothers by men who do not understand them, neuroticized by the tensions between their subconscious physical urges and their conscious conformity to society’s strictures against even the possibility of emotions—women who wail futilely against their society.
Cane is a world of men traumatised and destroyed by bigotry, men bent double by materialism, dreamers who cannot rouse themselves to action, men who rationalise their desires into idealised abstractions, men who cover in drink and sex to hide their fears, men who cannot afford help beyond that of material goods.
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stonesIt isn’t necessary to know exactly what it means in order to feind pleasure in reading Cane. In fact it is easy to support the impression that Cane is a collection of fragments coincidentally unified by a common binding. It is a collection of character sketches, short poems, and a play. The first discrete section of the book contains six sketches. Each is set in rural Georgia and focuses on a woman’s relationship to her instinctual sexual being. The second discrete part of Cane follows the trail of history to portray characters who have migrated from the rural South to Washington D.C.
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
The theme of the first part is reinforced by the impressionistic style of narration that conveys the sensations of instinctual life as the narrator comes to feel them. With the second part that style is no longer functional for Toomer, because he believes the urban environment, in contrast to the world of cane and soil and pine, and the changing social experience cut people off from the sources of feeling and vitiate their spirit. Toomer, therefore, needs a style in the second part that covnveys the disintegration of collective and spontaneous life.
When Paul is at last ready to love, he insists upon talking about it to a doorman, assuring him that it is a genuine love, and thus donning spontaneity. When he returns from this self-conscious apology, Bona is already gone. Like Muriel and others in the world of Cane, Kabnis out of fear blocks the flow of spontaneous feeling.
I used t love that girl. Yassur. An sometimes when th moon is thick an I hear dogs up th valley barkin an some old woman fetches out her song, an th winds seem like th Lord made them for t fetch an carry th smell o pine an cane, an there aint no big job on foot, I sometimes get t thinkin that I still do.The dominant contrast between the Georgia section of Cane and the Northern section is between a natural response to sexual drives and a self-conscious, frustrating inability to realise oneself. Part One thus shows the Black Southerner in his twilight hour, his strength and beauty still discernible against the complementary background of Georgia’s pine forests and cane fields, but his future definitely in jeopardy. In Part Two the background changes, becoming now the streets and “white-walled” buildings of Northern cities. There the women are afraid of their sexuality, and men are afraid to approach them. Civilisation stifles them; the pressure to conform makes them impotent.
It is also true, however, that consciously or subconsciously Toomer knew that he was visiting in the South. Thus, he could write sympathetically as one who feels kinship yet maintains artistic detachment. He desired merely to observe, to sense, and to reflect the milieu, not to change it. When he wrote of Washington and Chicago, however, he lost his detachment. He wanted to reform the people, to rid them of their indolence and their anxieties and their inhibitions. Consequently his tone became sharper, sardonic, satirical. Avey, he lamented, “is too much like a cow.” She lives by instinct, with few drives and fewer goals. Yet Toomer had not sat in judgment upon Karintha and Fern, who were also creatures of instinct. Toomer, one suspects, expected such behaviour from them—they were the Southern Blacks, “the children of nature”.
“Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”Cane is a challenging piece of experimental writing. It walks the line between feeding into the stereotype of Black people as over sexualised beings, and trying to write from a place within oneself, disregarding the social stigma and what white people might think. The women in Cane are objectified to the point that they become damaged. And though Jean Toomer is clearly trying to subvert this objectification of women, in doing so, he must (paradoxically) objectify them first. He writes with purpose. He tries to convey the message that no matter how hard women try, and no matter what they do, they are not permitted to be in control of their lives. Alice Walker said of the book, “It has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it.”
June 2, 2018
If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta.
I find it impossible this morning to attempt comment on a lynching or a literary reflection thereof. Despite my tone deaf groaning as of late about dialect, the final parable in this tome touched me. Earnest. Cane is a modernist mélange of prose and verse. A Biblical air is present but the motivations are Freudian.
This book was recommended to me about 10 years ago by a childhood friend. That friend was entitled to his own weary blues.
I find it impossible this morning to attempt comment on a lynching or a literary reflection thereof. Despite my tone deaf groaning as of late about dialect, the final parable in this tome touched me. Earnest. Cane is a modernist mélange of prose and verse. A Biblical air is present but the motivations are Freudian.
This book was recommended to me about 10 years ago by a childhood friend. That friend was entitled to his own weary blues.
July 3, 2020
Tom bound to the stake. His breast was bare. Nails’ scratches let little lines of blood trickle down and mat into the hair. His face, his eyes were set and stony. Except for irregular breathing, one would have thought him already dead. Torches were flung onto the pile. A great flare muffled in black smoke shot upward. The mob yelled. The mob was silent. Now Tom could be seen within the flames. Only his head, erect, lean, like a blackened stone. Stench of burning flesh soaked the air. Tom’s eyes popped. His head settled downward. The mob yelled.
The white mob's lynching of Tom, a black man, in retribution for Tom's cutting the throat of Bob Stone, a white man who'd attacked him for seeing "his" Louisa, a black woman who worked for his family, is unusual within Cane, in the straightforwardness of the racial, sexual, and class conflict and violence. There is a lot of racial, sexual, and class tension in this 1923 modernist novel of African-American life in Georgia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, but it more often is expressed in conflicted thoughts and rich dialogue than in physical confrontation. Women and men fear each other, blacks and whites fear each other, biracial women and men struggle with their identities and with society. The kaleidoscopic novel is in the form of short stories, vignettes, and a drama, stitched together with poetry, and in its formal experimentalism, themes, and time frame, it reminds me of Faulkner. I come away remembering feelings and striking images, but not with ideas.
Although I enjoyed listening to the free LibriVox recording on my daily walks, the complexity of the book far exceeded my ability to take it in, and I found myself reading an e-book of it after each listening session to correct and confirm my impressions.
The white mob's lynching of Tom, a black man, in retribution for Tom's cutting the throat of Bob Stone, a white man who'd attacked him for seeing "his" Louisa, a black woman who worked for his family, is unusual within Cane, in the straightforwardness of the racial, sexual, and class conflict and violence. There is a lot of racial, sexual, and class tension in this 1923 modernist novel of African-American life in Georgia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, but it more often is expressed in conflicted thoughts and rich dialogue than in physical confrontation. Women and men fear each other, blacks and whites fear each other, biracial women and men struggle with their identities and with society. The kaleidoscopic novel is in the form of short stories, vignettes, and a drama, stitched together with poetry, and in its formal experimentalism, themes, and time frame, it reminds me of Faulkner. I come away remembering feelings and striking images, but not with ideas.
Although I enjoyed listening to the free LibriVox recording on my daily walks, the complexity of the book far exceeded my ability to take it in, and I found myself reading an e-book of it after each listening session to correct and confirm my impressions.
July 12, 2008
Though not as well known as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer is considered one of the shining stars of the Harlem Renaissance and this collection of short stories and poems is his best work. Published in the early 20's, it shows the influence of many writers of that period who were especially fascinated with the technique of repetition -- sentences, clauses, phrases, words, you name it. It's a tricky skill, as repetition can be both effective and annoying. Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, in their short stories, could be effective with it. Gertrude Stein was just annoying.
Toomer was also ahead of his time in that he scorned use of apostrophes for contractions and possession, and quotation marks for dialogue. Instead he used the interview style of placing the character's name followed by a colon and what is said. The stories also employ dialect to replicate the way blacks spoke in his time.
Uneven, with some stories stronger than others, Toomer deserves props for his ability to bring forth mood and anger, lust and guilt, crime and punishment. He also excels at use of personification and creative use of verbs (wherein nouns become verbs, etc.).
Toomer was also ahead of his time in that he scorned use of apostrophes for contractions and possession, and quotation marks for dialogue. Instead he used the interview style of placing the character's name followed by a colon and what is said. The stories also employ dialect to replicate the way blacks spoke in his time.
Uneven, with some stories stronger than others, Toomer deserves props for his ability to bring forth mood and anger, lust and guilt, crime and punishment. He also excels at use of personification and creative use of verbs (wherein nouns become verbs, etc.).
January 15, 2019
What is the shape of a novel that has withstood the test of time? First written in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative work that rewrites the definition of "novel". Divided in three parts, each part is distinctive not only for its setting but also for its prose. The first is in part vignettes that exude a sexual allure. Seemingly unconnected descriptions of hued women and a landscape bound to the history of slavery are interwoven with bits of poetry and odes that resound like Old Negro spirituals. The middle passages carry the reader up North during the Great Migration. In this part the syncopated rhythms of jazz dominate the prose. Lastly, the reader returns home to the South in this short story/drama piece that recalls the fear of racial violence and questions the impact of Christianity on the black community through vernacular dialogue. Longing is a theme that runs throughout the work. Longing to be seen beyond the physical. Longing to be recognized and valued. Longing to be loved. Most of all, a longing to return to our true selves, emotionally and spiritually.
Special Thanks to NetGalley and Dover Publications for access to this work.
Special Thanks to NetGalley and Dover Publications for access to this work.
December 30, 2016
A wonderful, magisterial voice - at its best, up there with Whitman - but young and unfinished. It has that explosive, tightrope feel of some early works by brilliant writers. It's known as the first important black novel of the Harlem Renaissance, which is funny because it's not a novel - it's some sort of weird poem/play/novel hybrid - and Toomer, who was of mixed parentage, didn't identify as black. It's hard to see which he hated and feared the most - women or himself.
February 2, 2021
I had no idea that I was going to love this as much as I do.
more soon. I need to think first.
more soon. I need to think first.
Read
September 24, 2016Two readerships here for which this one is UEber=pertinent ::
1) readers of the Classics of African=American fiction.
2) readers of things experimental in the category of It's Not Really a Novel (but what then is it?)
3) Also, for readers of I Ain't An African=American Author and I Don't Write Experimental Novels/Stuff.
Really, this is one of the places it all began.
1) readers of the Classics of African=American fiction.
2) readers of things experimental in the category of It's Not Really a Novel (but what then is it?)
3) Also, for readers of I Ain't An African=American Author and I Don't Write Experimental Novels/Stuff.
Really, this is one of the places it all began.
Read
December 22, 2011This was a thoroughly strange and surreal book, made all the more surreal by the fact that it was one of the first avant-garde black American novels. Toomer's world explodes with color and light, with shades of Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson. If there is a document of American magical realism, this is it.
It's too easy when describing the rural black South to rely on stereotypes and minstrelsy (Zora Neale Hurston, I'm looking at you). Toomer, to his credit, doesn't, at all. His world is too damn weird.
It's too easy when describing the rural black South to rely on stereotypes and minstrelsy (Zora Neale Hurston, I'm looking at you). Toomer, to his credit, doesn't, at all. His world is too damn weird.
July 30, 2015
“Cane” blew me away. Southern literature, in my opinion, contains some of the most powerful and immortal books in the American literary canon. The dark, enchanted history of the South brings forth ample material for colorful characters and complex social issues. Novels born in the South are born out of and into its troubled past–a landscape fraught with the difficult union of charmed myth and bloody reality. Toomer taps into the tragic legacy of slavery to write one of the best, most enduring novels about the African-American experience in the South. It’s beautiful, it’s graphic, it’s disturbing, it’s compelling–it’s everything a novel should be.
READ IF: You want to read one of the most outstanding books in American literature. Not even kidding.
READ IF: You want to read one of the most outstanding books in American literature. Not even kidding.
June 11, 2011
It's so difficult to categorize Cane. For the sake of convenience, one could call it a novel, and that is generally how the work is treated. But novel really neither describes the book accurately nor does it justice. Cane is an incantory combination of poetry and prose, vignettes that are loosely held together by the common theme of black American life in rural Georgia at the turn of the twentieth century. But the prose is highly poetic:
"Pine needles, like mazda, are brilliantly aglow. No rain has come to take the rustle from the falling sweet-gum leaves. Over in the forest, across the swamp, a sawmill blows its closing whistle. Smoke curls up. Marvelous web spun by the spider sawdust pile. Curls up and spreads itself pine-high above the branch, a single silver band along the eastern valley."
On the writing of Cane, the author, Jean Toomer, said, "The folk spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end."
This new critical edition of Cane is the only way to approach the book. A full and detailed introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, letters and personal documents of Toomer, critical essays, and all the associated scholarly apparatus help bring context and understanding to this rich but elusive text. I first encountered the book some years ago, and it has stuck with me--it's one of those books you can spend years coming back to, finding something new every time.
"Pine needles, like mazda, are brilliantly aglow. No rain has come to take the rustle from the falling sweet-gum leaves. Over in the forest, across the swamp, a sawmill blows its closing whistle. Smoke curls up. Marvelous web spun by the spider sawdust pile. Curls up and spreads itself pine-high above the branch, a single silver band along the eastern valley."
On the writing of Cane, the author, Jean Toomer, said, "The folk spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end."
This new critical edition of Cane is the only way to approach the book. A full and detailed introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, letters and personal documents of Toomer, critical essays, and all the associated scholarly apparatus help bring context and understanding to this rich but elusive text. I first encountered the book some years ago, and it has stuck with me--it's one of those books you can spend years coming back to, finding something new every time.
March 17, 2008
This one is a gem; the writing is gorgeous, the stories absorbing. P-thought of you, this is a definite genre bender with episodic chapters/short stories and poetry, always referred to as a novel. Toomer is often grouped with the Harlem Renaissance and the stories center on the reverse migration of a urban Northern man to the rural South. However, Toomer never worked with black themes again and did not consider himself part of that community. As such the book exhibits a fractured experience and the language compliments this. Its singularity makes it that much more special.
November 11, 2023
The Harlem Renaissance was one of those special moments of electric creativity and artistic output that changed social consciousness. The significance and impact of the works produced in this time is not easily overstated, and essentially set a groundwork for what would become the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. I find the writing of this era fascinating and beautiful, tragic and empowering, challenging and rewarding, and it’s an easy default for me to seek out some novel of this period when I’m at a loss of what I’d like to read next.
Having just read James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, reading Jean Toomer’s CANE reflects the immense diversity of the literature that gets lumped into this “genre.” Where the former is a fairly straight story written in a documentarian style, Toomer’s writing is much experimental formally, narratively, and structurally. The novel—which I’m not even really sure it’s accurate to call this a “novel”—is composed of several vignettes, poems, and play-like dramas. Some characters recur, but overall, the novel is a thematically linked composition depicting southern life for black Americans in the early 20th century. Toomer describes the book’s structure as a “circle” which moves from the south to the north back to the south, which begins and ends with the vignette “Bona and Paul” that concludes the second section of the book.
The novel cycles through explorations of race via many different lenses: mixed race love, class disparity, North v. South U.S. culture. It also works to explore the dichotomies of natural/rural vs. urban, as well as the objectification of women.
Beautifully constructed and emotionally resonant, Toomer’s book shows the expressive capacity of Modernism’s most compelling traits—to transform Romantic ideals into stylistic and formal expressions of human experience and social commentary that feels True. There’s a mystical quality to the book as you read it, where it’s themes and ideas are so perfectly wed into its telling that you wonder how he was able to pull it off without feeling preachy or philosophizing. The vignettes are beautiful, sad, horrifying, just incredibly complex in their brevity and all work together to build a whole that is greater than its already impressive composite parts.
I think CANE, as its formal structure implies, is a book to be read and re-read in cycles. In many ways, it feels both of and outside of its time, which I think is why is endures. It is a challenging book—it challenges the reader to do work to understand, to make connection, to fill in the gaps and appreciate what it strives to accomplish. And that work is rewarded in depths.
Having just read James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, reading Jean Toomer’s CANE reflects the immense diversity of the literature that gets lumped into this “genre.” Where the former is a fairly straight story written in a documentarian style, Toomer’s writing is much experimental formally, narratively, and structurally. The novel—which I’m not even really sure it’s accurate to call this a “novel”—is composed of several vignettes, poems, and play-like dramas. Some characters recur, but overall, the novel is a thematically linked composition depicting southern life for black Americans in the early 20th century. Toomer describes the book’s structure as a “circle” which moves from the south to the north back to the south, which begins and ends with the vignette “Bona and Paul” that concludes the second section of the book.
The novel cycles through explorations of race via many different lenses: mixed race love, class disparity, North v. South U.S. culture. It also works to explore the dichotomies of natural/rural vs. urban, as well as the objectification of women.
Beautifully constructed and emotionally resonant, Toomer’s book shows the expressive capacity of Modernism’s most compelling traits—to transform Romantic ideals into stylistic and formal expressions of human experience and social commentary that feels True. There’s a mystical quality to the book as you read it, where it’s themes and ideas are so perfectly wed into its telling that you wonder how he was able to pull it off without feeling preachy or philosophizing. The vignettes are beautiful, sad, horrifying, just incredibly complex in their brevity and all work together to build a whole that is greater than its already impressive composite parts.
I think CANE, as its formal structure implies, is a book to be read and re-read in cycles. In many ways, it feels both of and outside of its time, which I think is why is endures. It is a challenging book—it challenges the reader to do work to understand, to make connection, to fill in the gaps and appreciate what it strives to accomplish. And that work is rewarded in depths.
October 10, 2015
I enjoyed this. I really think everyone should read at least a couple of poems from this book. Or some of the short stories. My favorite was "Bona and Paul."
Now it's time to write my english paper on this.... :/
Now it's time to write my english paper on this.... :/
February 22, 2022
So excited to study this and better understand the context and influence of Cane as a piece of modernist writing. The language and imagery are just magical (yet also sometimes incredibly brutal), and I had a few “ohmygoodnesshowdidahumanbraincomeupwiththis” moments.
October 2, 2016
This is a key piece of Harlem Renaissance proestry and its detailed and eloquent and beautiful and haunting and mellifluous...
October 20, 2008
Combines poetry, essays and fiction in a unique format. Lyrically written. I much enjoyed it.
February 25, 2019
This was so beautiful! Slow going bc it is a Piece Of Literature but I loooved the poetry. My first time reading a composite novel
February 27, 2023
This book is a mash of short stories and poems from the Harlem renaissance that all seemed to feature the word cane somewhere within their text. Toomer writes about the beauty found in the female form, and often compares that beauty, to the beauty of nature found in the south. There is a longing to possess the women in these stories as objects, as if they are not individuals with their own thoughts and dreams. The book touches on the discrimination and hatred projected at individuals for breaking away from the "norm", like becky the white woman with two black sons who is shunned and disregarded from her community until she dies. Each of the women are living their lives on their terms, setting an example for what should come next as a society. Each of the characters in the book seem to be created by the fictions about certain types of people; the loose woman, the jealous lover, the friend-zoned male, the Northern man, etc... its almost as if they are divided into stereotypes of humans and slaves to the roles society expects of them. The stories are charged with bitterness and indignation about the structure of society while also celebrating the joys of black life.
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