{"id":37124,"date":"2014-08-22T14:54:55","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T14:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37124"},"modified":"2014-08-22T14:54:55","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T14:54:55","slug":"brother-mine-the-correspondence-of-jean-toomer-and-waldo-frank-by-kathleen-pfeiffer-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37124","title":{"rendered":"Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank by Kathleen Pfeiffer (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank by Kathleen Pfeiffer (review)<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Callaloo<\/a>
\nVolume 37, Number 3, Summer 2014<\/a>
\npages 735-739
\nDOI: 10.1353\/cal.2014.0094<\/a><\/p>\n

L. Lamar Wilson<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Jean Toomer\u2019s<\/a> Cane<\/em><\/a> remains one of the most enigmatic works that emerged during the last century. In the past three decades, critics have probed auto\/biography, psychoanalysis, sociopolitical and theological discourse, gender studies, and Toomer\u2019s own critical essays for answers to questions raised by his exploration of racial and national identity and dislocation, black male and female sexuality, and the metaphorical topoi of the United States North and South in the text. Nellie McKay, Robert B. Jones, Rudolph P. Byrd, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Karen Jackson Ford, Mark Whalan, and Kathleen Pfeiffer<\/a> have unearthed insightful details about the circumstances surrounding Toomer\u2019s formation of a complex racial identity, his life in the immediate years preceding Cane\u2019s creation and publication, and the text\u2019s impact on his subsequent writing and the Afro-modern and postmodern canons.<\/p>\n

Whalan\u2019s Letters of Jean Toomer: 1919\u20131924<\/em>, published in 2006, and Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank<\/em><\/a>, Pfeiffer\u2019s 2010 response, have been particularly important. Letters gives scholars access to Toomer\u2019s willingness to emphasize whatever aspects of his racial and cultural identity would appeal to black and white literati alike at any given moment during the years bookending Cane\u2019s<\/em> 1923 publication. Moreover, through Letters, Toomer\u2019s co-dependency on Waldo Frank<\/a>, his closest friend and mentor at the time, comes into fuller focus vis-\u00e0-vis impassioned declarations of artistic allegiance and filial devotion. With Brother Mine<\/em>, Pfeiffer complicates critical notions of their relationship, offering a chronological collation of epistles between the two men. From Frank\u2019s first letter to Toomer in October 1920, Pfeiffer implicates Frank in encouraging Toomer, who was initially reserved and professional, to open up to his input and affections and to the possibilities of publication available to him as a modernist \u201cNegro\u201d poet. In her introduction, Pfeiffer links the dissolution of their friendship to Toomer\u2019s affair with Frank\u2019s wife, art therapist Margaret Naumburg<\/a>, and marks Toomer a turncoat. However, she discounts the betrayal Toomer expressed feeling in his autobiography of having been reduced to \u201ca fraction of Negro blood\u201d when, in fact, he desired to create \u201ca synthesis in the matters of the mind and spirit analogous, perhaps, to the actual fact of at least six blood minglings\u201d (qtd. in Pfeiffer 29). Ultimately, it would seem the strictures of America\u2019s \u201cone-drop rule<\/a>\u201d on the social status of one marked black was as much to blame.<\/p>\n

What makes Brother Mine<\/em> compelling, then, is that which made the earliest English and American readers fond of Pamela, The Power of Sympathy<\/em>, and other epistolary novels: an intimate look at a complex love story. Readers see two men finding homosocial<\/a> solidarity as they manipulate the constructs of race in the poetry that would become one of the New Negro Renaissance\u2019s first critically acclaimed works. They also see Toomer offer Frank critical feedback on Holiday, Frank\u2019s version of their trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina<\/a>, which their letters often romanticize\u2014while offering scant details. They read some of the most honest confessions in print of a white American man\u2019s obsession with and hunger to embody blackness, and they witness Toomer deftly navigating his multiracial identity. As he and his beloved Jewish brother reach for a raceless identity neither can attain in America, readers watch them commit the ultimate crime: interracial love. Frank\u2019s gleeful interest in the black American experience is palpable as he alludes to the pleasures and challenges he and Toomer encounter as they venture into the US South. Moreover, it is clear that Frank is living vicariously through Toomer\u2019s relationships with his grandmother, best friend Ken, and on-again, off-again girlfriend Mae. What emerges from their dialogue is both men\u2019s problematic conception of a kind of Lacanian jouissance<\/a> subsumed in blackness, which Toomer calls a \u201csoil [that] is a good rich brown\u201d that \u201cshould yield splendidly to our plowing\u201d in an August 3, 1922, letter in which he makes final plans for the pair\u2019s Spartanburg excursion (59).<\/p>\n

Central to the poetic re-envisioning of Cane<\/em> that emerges in Brother Mine is<\/em> the homo-social desire that permeates every page. As Pfeiffer notes, the almost…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank by Kathleen Pfeiffer (review) Callaloo Volume 37, Number 3, Summer 2014 pages 735-739 DOI: 10.1353\/cal.2014.0094 L. Lamar Wilson Jean Toomer\u2019s Cane remains one of the most enigmatic works that emerged during the last century. In the past three decades, critics have probed auto\/biography, psychoanalysis, sociopolitical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,5],"tags":[4284,17777,1996,17778,5209,17779,4909,17775,17776,4902,10778],"class_list":["post-37124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-book-reviews","tag-callaloo","tag-farah-jasmine-griffin","tag-jean-toomer","tag-karen-jackson-ford","tag-kathleen-pfeiffer","tag-l-lamar-wilson","tag-mark-whalan","tag-nellie-mckay","tag-robert-b-jones","tag-rudolph-p-byrd","tag-waldo-frank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}