Unknown: This is so fun. I just looked at the participants list and I, I'm seeing Carolyn Decker, who put together and edited the critical edition of “A Drama of the Southwest,” which is the truly the fountain of all of my knowledge about it. This is the reason I read it when it came out in 2016. And it was Carolyn, your work is the reason I thought about this this year, as I was putting together my column, on on Toomer and on this work. I guess I should say in that connection that I I wrote about Toomer this year. I'm always looking for excuses to read about, write about Jean Toomer, with whom I-- of whom I am no scholar, but with whom I've been fairly obsessed for much of my life. And this year, given all the happenings, I don't need to recite them for you. There was no theater, and I'm a theater critic of The New Yorker. And for a while there, now it's a little bit better. For a while there, there was really nothing happening in the theater world, mostly sort of maybe zoom renditions of things that people had already seen. And there wasn't much to review, but I still wanted to keep doing my job. And so my thoughts turned to Jean Toomer. Partially because the atmosphere in my own home was so much like the atmosphere as I imagined it in a in one of Jean Toomer's homes, in Bucks County, Philadelphia, what he called the mill house, he would, at the end of the day, have a kind of you might call it a drama of rest or as he called it deserving time, toward the end of the day. Later in his life, Toomer becomes more and more unfortunately of a functioning alcoholic. At the end of the day, he says okay, after everybody's finished their work, and we'll talk more about what that work was. For conveniently for him, it was worth putting together as house but it was also construed as a kind of spiritual practice. But at the end of the day, everybody that lived in his house and worked with him, and his sort of acolytes that he had collected over his years, would come together and have a, what he called the deserving hour of sort of drinking and talking about art often arguing with tumor about art. And this was the atmosphere in my house, in those early days of a pandemic, just my wife and I sitting around talking about the things that we were reading and trying to distract ourselves. So that was the genesis of my rereading of, of this interesting play. I don't think you can call it a great play. But it's an interesting play. I think it talks to a bunch of the the preoccupations and the worries and the lasting obsessions of Toomer as we meet him in really all of his work. He's really quite consistent that way. It's easy, often too easy to read too much, too much autobiography into the sort of corpus of a person. But with Toomer, It's never a bad guide. Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, DC, and he was the grandson of a really interesting American character P. B. S. Pinchback, who was, I believe, the 21st, Governor of Louisiana, and was very mixed racially pinched back was. He claimed his African ancestry sort of intermittently. His his mother was what they called at the time a mulatto, and also claimed links to several different Native American tribes. And that lore of Pinchback who was one of the sort of direct after the direct Reconstruction Era, that first post civil rights moment when, for a moment there, the South is free to is open to black involvement in politics, not just in voting, but in serving as a kind of representative as Pinchback did as governor. Governor, but Pinchback by the way, was the only black governor in America until the 1990s, where Doug Wilder comes into Virginia. So he really is a kind of represents a lost opportunity for black political engagement. The lore of his grandfather, for for Toomer becomes a kind of exotic hint of what the world might possibly what the world might possibly be when Toomer goes to college at University of Wisconsin Madison He quickly fails at that, at the work of being in college. And it's never really quite explained. But he kind of feels unsettled. And he over the next couple of years, but the years 1914 to 1918, he goes to five other colleges. The only account he ever gives of this in the autobiography that he never quite finishes is that he's feeling restless. And that this sojourn among these places, has something to do with his desire to synthesize all of the American strains that he feels present within himself. He's deciding, and this becomes a trope for anybody who talks about Toomer, he's deciding whether to identify with this black southern part of his identity to identify with the hints or the rumors of native ancestry, or with the larger mainstream white culture, which seems ready to accept him based on based on his looks. Here is a, I forgot to turn the slide before but here's governor Pinchback as his grandfather. But something interesting happens between 1918 and 1921, which is that he decides to become a writer and in 1921, kind of, I guess, loosely fired by this, by this ambition, he goes down south to Georgia to accept a post as a teacher, a rural school. And he feels incredibly out of place there. But he also is captivated by what he calls what are the folk songs of the South that later becomes sort of the backbone spiritually and formally of his great work came that if you know, Toomer, this is why you know, him as Cane. And it's interesting, and I think this inaugurates a pattern in tumors life, which becomes apparent in a drama of the Southwest, which we'll talk about a bit, which is that his writing, and especially his attempts at drama, this is what is of interest with him, for me as a, as a theatre critic, is that he takes advantage of the sort of inescapably dialectic, form of theater, the back and forth of it, he uses that as a way to further immerse himself in a place. His attempts at drama, which, interestingly, he's a very committed dramatist, even though he barely ever finishes a play. So Cane, which is essentially the result of this trip to Georgia, this sort of uncertain, Northerner. His immersion into the folk culture of the South, and this attempt to harmonize himself with what W.E.B Dubois will call the spiritual strivings of the South. That is what ends up being cane the structure of cane is sort of an early overture all focused in the poems and the fictional sketches in the first section on the folk culture of the South. The second follow is many of the same black people that we see in their sort of what I guess Toomer would call their native environment in the south now come up to places like industrial urban Chicago. So this initial move of displacement that on some level, reproduces the experience of Toomer's own family. And the third, and this is interesting. Cane is so beguiling because it includes so many different genres. Interestingly, Cane culminates in a play called Kabnis, and it's about a man named Ralph Kabnis going down to Georgia to be a school teacher, and his disorientation with this sojourn is exactly you know, Toomer in his letters. It says, I think it's a letter to Waldo Frank has great mentor and sometimes benefactors, he says "Kabnis is me." And so drama for Toomer becomes this vehicle to navigate the logic of this sojourn, the journey, which is so much. If there's any great Toomerian image, it is the image of the journey, the sojourn. He's always moving restlessly. In some ways, you could say, as Henry Louis Gates says, you know, in flight from himself and from what he knows as his racial and heritage, but also his racial inheritance that is. But also I think moving toward his, his his true goal of a kind of dissolution into the country. And one of his worries when he goes to Georgia is that the folk cultures, these folk cultures will cease to exist. That every that the sort of teleological movement of America is away from ethnic enclosure away from what we might call identity politics and toward dissolution into the greater American. In that way, he's not unlike he's not too much unlike someone like Ralph Ellison, who figures America as a kind of as a mulatto nation, in fact, as a, as a as a product of that mixture and that our white, our whites are more black than anybody else's whites and our blacks are more white than anybody else's black. But in any case, Cane, you know, it's funny, because speaking of Ellison here in this, this is a great image this great initial dustjacket from the Beinecke collections. The success of Cane is a kind of cataclysm for Toomer. He always says that he's just satisfied with it. And I think what he's truly dissatisfied with is a quote like this one. By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance it ranks with Richard Wright's name, son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, this kind of thing. Cane, maybe paradoxically for him, he maybe he meant it, and especially the act of Kabnis, which, you know, is almost a coming of age of this man, Ralph Kabnis's indoctrination and tutelage in the South. Maybe he thought that it would be an agent of that kind of dissolution. But in fact, it was not it labeled him as a black writer, which is what he did not want, he expressly did not want. And so something else really interesting happens to him around this time, which is that in 1924, as many folks know, he is inducted into recruited into falls into the thrall of. I don't want to too tightly circumscribe the trajectory of this conversion, I guess we can call it into the work of George Gurdjieff, the spiritualist who, whose work was and I and I think anybody, anytime somebody talks about the Gurdjieff work, but the "W" there is very much capitalized was about a sort of harmonizing of mind, and body and spirit through different sort of, I would call them sort of proto yoga movements and mantras, and also a steady diet of physical labor. So very conveniently, for Gurdjieff, and very conveniently for Toomer later when he becomes a sort of leader in America, Gurdjieff work is. a lot of the the so called work is. And then we clean up the backyard. And so whoever's house it is, this is a double benefit for them. Toomer, I mentioned the work that happened at his house, that is what was happening in his house. And so the deserving hour of which I spoke was in some ways, a respite from his own, his own kind of impromptu group of students, whom contractors. But again, the Gurdjieff work does kind of two things for him. One, it sort of deepens in him this impulse toward synthesis toward bringing together and then the other thing that it does is that it brings him into contact with the people. Eventually it brings him into contact with the people who will bring him on another sojourn to the southwest. Toomer quickly, because he is, by all accounts, and you saw it in that first photograph. By all accounts, he's a very handsome and alluring and charismatic man. His however deep and difficult his sort of psychodramas, they are not apparent when he's talking to you. He is very convincing. And so he very quickly and he's also this kind of organic, improvised theorist, so his contact with the Gurdjieff work immediately sort of makes it into his writing and it makes it into he decides that he should be a leader of the work and Gurdjieff at least in the beginning until they have some conflicts over money. Totally says yes, you should be one of my emissary. So Toomer helps to set up a Gurdjieff group in Harlem. He goes to Chicago and becomes a very, very influential leader of the work there. And he comes into contact with and really helps draws as followers of a kind, um, folks like Mabel Dodge Luhan, the great philanthropist and patron of the arts, who helps to start the Taoist art colony in New Mexico. He also sort of throughout the 20s has become friends with other people who will become members of that archive including Georgia O'Keeffe. One, I guess if you're interested in literary personal intrigue, one really interesting passage in his life is his his encounters with friendship with Alfred Stieglitz and especially Georgia O'Keeffe. After Toomer's first wife dies in the process of giving birth to this child, he has a I guess, a moment of intimacy with Georgia O'Keeffe for many months after he goes to visit her here in New New York. But Upstate and Lake George. They start up a very quite beautiful correspondence. This is Georgia O'Keeffe's handwriting in a in a letter to Toomer. She says it's hard to read, "You seem to have given me a strangely beautiful feeling of balance that makes the days seem very precious to me. You seem to have come into life in such a quiet surprising and this is a moment where she's been- she's been sick for a fashion," time. And he helps to, in some ways, re inspire her. And she does the same for him. In some ways. You know, some people have talked about their relationship as a mutual reinforcement of a sort of drama common to both of them, which is their ardent dislike, for the tendency of the outer world to try to put them in place. Toomer as a black writer. O'Keefe as a woman painter. Their desire to step out of that sort of particularity and reach for something more synthesize something more universal is something that makes them not only briefly lovers, but sort of comrades in art. And so anyway, I, I realize now that I've taken a longer time to get to “A Drama of the Southwest." In part because of his sort of prospecting, to to potentially create a Gurdjieff community, Toomer starts to make trips down to Taos, New Mexico, partially to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan, who wants to give him the money to start a Gurdjieff institute, in in the southwest. And again, what this journey does is give Toomer, another way that he thinks that he can kind of reconceive the country along ethnic, regional, but ultimately spiritual lines. One of the beautiful, I mean, it's interesting to go from some lines from Kabnis, that's that dramatic section in Cane and some lines in "A Drama of the Southwest," which again, is highly autobiographical. It's about a man named Tom Elliott, who goes down to the southwest to Taos to write. It's essentially exactly what Toomer does. And interestingly Toomer, despite his flaws, seems to be quite self self self aware. Tom Elliot's a lot like Toomer. He is idealistic and given too expansive, talking, not really noticing whether anybody's listening to him. He too, observes the deserving hour and looks forward to it basically all day. He too, is interestingly, obsessed with their problems of the day he talks a lot about feminism, and how the community in Taos has become a kind of he calls it a female fascism. Toomer is very chauvinistic all through his life. And, but he's very interested in in themes like feminism and revolutionary socialism. And again, his forays into drama always sort of have something to do with his interest in the time and his interest in harmony and synthesis. So, back when Cane is written, he's also been working on plays that he barely there's a very short sketch that's called bellow, which is a one act sketch, which he calls them of Negro life. It's a kind of, it's the kind of thing that could have served as another playlet that would have slotted more easily into the first section of Cane. He's got a play called Natalie man, which another Toomer play which is as yet unproduced. And it's all about revolutionary feminism. After the trip to the Southwest, he goes to India. And he writes, again starts and does not finish several plays, one is called Colombo Madras Mail, the other is called Pilgrim Did You Say and it's about his sort of disillusionment with India because he's had this sort of idealizing relationship with the East and the the, what he would call the East with the philosophies that seemed to him exotic but seem again, a source of potentially spiritual power. So anyway, listen to this from Kabnis, right. This man trying to orient himself visa vie the American South, this is from Kabnis. On the one hand, he says the hills and valleys were humming, heaving with folk songs, the kind of beautiful lyricism that we often associate with Cane, but then he also in his room in this sort of first, this opening scene and Kabnis of odd despair, he's kind of this you see this man suffering and we're not really ever sure why. He says this loneliness, dumbness, awful, intangible oppression is enough to drive a man insane, someone dealing with the consequences of a trip. On the other hand, and Carolyn talks wonderfully about this line in this- Carolyn Decker does- talks wonderfully about this line and his thought about the potentiality that he finds in the journey. One of my favorite lines of drama of the Southwest is intoned by this, there's a character called an interpreter, who often will set scenes and it's almost like the narrator figure in our town, for those who love theater. And so at the beginning of the play, and you can see in these notes of tumors for the, for the play, it's, it's interesting because these are very abstract, the great question of life, if human existence is for the purpose that human beings may develop souls, if struggle is the big basic condition by means of which souls are developed, then all difficulties all struggles are valuable. That's his notes language, but that's also very much the language of the early parts of the play, that some of the stage directions are poetic and totally unstageable, by the way. But then also the interpreter gives this overture and you can see Toomer trying to resolve some of those tensions that exist in the mind of a person like Ralph Kabnis. Here he is on this sort of trip to the southwest, that Tom Elliott is is undertaking. "They will come southwestward," he says, "not on horseback or in a covered wagon, but driving a motor car even so they will strike experience here as man ever does when his heart is freshly given to a place." And I think that that is one of the in this forgotten work that is one of the signal lines of all Toomer's work to me. This continued struggle this constant effort to give his heart freshly to a place seems like a person in search of a kind of a kind of Zion a final home that would do all of his synthesis for him. But he here does it again through the language and through the the the logic of a play. "A Drama of the Southwest" is much more direct and much less poetic in it's address than Kabnis is here to for most successful play has been Again he lays out almost a psychic disclosure in what as are supposed to be his his set design or his stage instructions. He says here's here are some stage instructions. If there are any set designers in the audience just try to stage this, okay? "Then silence again, and life becomes existence again. And existence focused for a time and a group of seeing men expands to the mountain and the close stars" So this cosmic representation of again, this, this, this journey toward something, but this experiment, if you want with a place. Also really, before we before I stop, I think I've already taken that much more time than I then I plan to. There's a interestingly, he, he sets up this dynamic that anybody who spent a lot of time in a college town with, you would know, as a sort of student versus townie dynamic. These, these locals called "________________" riesling that is, I always want to call them after name after a sweet wine, but no, it's riesling as in the sun. And these folks sit on the roof and they talk about the colonists like, like Toomer. So again, this odd self awareness, he understands himself as a kind of tourist. But they sit on this roof and they talk about the colonists that are descending on this corner of the country. One of them is sort of in the clouds and other the other has this sort of proletarian or orientation is described by Toomer as being above art. __________ giving some of the sort of odd essential ism that is characteristic of Toomer's work says "The spirit of the Indians still lives in and dominates this land disappearing elsewhere. It is vital here." So again, this idea that culture is always in danger of disappearing under the sort of gravity of American togetherness. "Vital like these hills." So this little cluster of Earth built houses, the entire world comes. "Comes and goes as fast as it can and why wants to be seen here?" This is the person that he doesn't care about. All this he's not cared about. He doesn't care about the spirit of the Indian. It says "Comes and goes as fast as it can. And why what's to be seen here? One bank, one newspaper, grocery and drug stores like you can see anywhere an armory, a baseball field, the fish hatchery, bad roads, the plaza and the dump heap, Why should anyone come all this way to get dust in his eyes? As for me, it means a job." And so, this opposition between this exalted ethnically fired view of the country and on the other hand, a much more pragmatic vision. Now, I will always associate Toomer with this with the more high flown version, but his inclusion of _______ to me shows so much. Shows so so much and so well, how, on some level ironic Toome could be and how, again, self aware he was about the, I don't know, silliness or idealism, or impossibility perhaps, of his of his project. Here is a is again from the from this wonderful collection. Here's a setting forth some more of this, this this language that's supposed to be scene directions, you know. Night-black- night of the New Mexican Southwest, a luminous black sky, and the stars seem close to her. That the logic there, the psychic meant to be meant to be made visual. We'd call it a failure, I think in theatrical terms, but for us, it's very self disclosing about Toomer and about his interests as a playwright feeble as his playwriting career ended up being that he wanted to use the particularities of the form in order to work out some of his minute sometimes and often grandiose feelings about the country. His worries about dissolution, his questions about identity and indeed, his many problems with himself. So I'll stop there.