Modernism/modernity

Elizabeth Hardwick once remarked that “Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self. . . . In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires.”¹ But, as Kathleen Pfeiffer demonstrates in this fascinating new collection, letters also forge and record intimacy, serve as conduits for aesthetic discovery, and disclose moments of vulnerability when candor trumps the imperative to snip and shape. Brother Mine shows two men’s fierce ambition to collaborate on what Jean Toomer called the “dual task of creating an American literature,” but it also shows their mutual need for “creative friendship” to sustain their often fragile aesthetic and emotional confidence (58, 29). Marked as much by braggadocio as by brotherhood, and with competitiveness constantly simmering under a surface of genuine respect and even love, this collection of letters between 1920 and 1924 records an intense and fruitful friendship situated at the crossroads of several of American modernism’s major routes.

In 1920, Frank was nationally famous as a precocious intellectual and one to watch: just thirty years old, he was an honorary fellow at Yale, the erstwhile editor of the Seven Arts, the author of two experimental novels, and one of America’s most insightful cultural critics. His Our America (1919), a mix of psycho-social cultural criticism and Whitmanian bardic spirituality, had continued where the Seven Arts left off by influentially prophesying a national cultural renewal led by the critics and artists of “Young America.” Toomer, by contrast, was drifting: a 25 year-old who had studied at six different colleges and universities without obtaining a degree, he was rapidly becoming a disappointment to his famous grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback (whose [End Page 661] Reconstruction-era political career involved service as the first-ever black state governor). Despite friendships with prominent African American intellectuals—notably Georgia Douglas Johnson and Alain Locke—Toomer felt his life in Washington, D. C. was drearily detached from the centers of modernist action. Yet by 1922, Toomer and Frank’s correspondence was aflame with the sense of a shared project: Frank saw Toomer as a writer of rare promise, capable of replacing the stale traditions of plantation fiction as a way of representing the South, and whose expertise could enhance his own novel of race relations, Holiday. Toomer was thriving on the inspiration gained from his trip to rural Georgia in 1921, but also on the advice, formal innovations, literary contacts, and editorial excellence of one of America’s leading modern novelists: he described Frank’s “sensitivity to muddy, ragged lines” as “unerring” (105). “Brother mine” is the salutation that begins many of their letters; the men swap anxieties and advice about stories and publishers, but also about wives, children, and girlfriends; and they plan the infamous fact-finding trip they would take together to Spartanburg, South Carolina, which saw Frank pass as black.

The culmination of this friendship was the publication of Toomer’s masterpiece of African American modernism, Cane (1923). For many years Frank’s importance to Cane was downplayed; his foreword was omitted from the 1969 re-issue, as Toomer’s importance to the Harlem Renaissance was given precedence over his connections to the cultural nationalist modernism of Young America. When this relationship was scrutinized, it was usually to Frank’s detriment, with Frank either painted as willfully misrepresenting Toomer’s racial status in his foreword to Cane, or as unable to comprehend Toomer’s visionary self-identification as the “First American,” irreducible to any one of America’s rapidly hardening racial classifications. This conception—fed by Toomer’s own autobiographies, which claimed that Frank had botched the foreword—has aligned Frank with several white “Negrotarians” of the Harlem Renaissance, to use Zora Neale Hurston’s impish term. Well-meaning but compromised by voyeuristic primitivism, these figures (including Carl Van Vechten, Charlotte Osgood Mason, and Fannie Hurst) were long criticized—most...