The Many Conversions of Jean Toomer

In the privacy of his personal writings, Jean Toomer (1894-1967) revealed a miserable man, “uprooted” by his lack of spiritual identity and self-knowledge. “I have sucked the moisture from my smallest rootlet  ̶ ,” he mourned, “my great trunk is dying. / The sun upon my roots is torture (Rusch 1980, 38).” As the years slipped by, relief continued to elude Jean Toomer. But, the moments of Toomer’s life where he did find a measure of solace were in the ecstatic highs of new spiritual, relational, and/or racial belonging. These transcendent spiritual “highs” may be charted through a succession of “conversions” that Toomer experienced throughout his life as a mystical experience of oneness with the internal self and the universe. Indeed, his novel Cane – an essential work of the Harlem Renaissance – is indicative of one of these conversions: a conversion to the spiritual American South. The many religious conversions of Jean Toomer moved him across the United States, across oceans, and across spiritual and racial boundaries. Employing a literary reading of Toomer’s writings, this paper explores the contours of his shifting spiritual journey from early devotion to literary brilliance, to a profound reverence for the people and spirit of the southern United States, to strict adherence to the esoteric teachings of Georges Gurdjieff, to Quaker mysticism, and more.

Toomer’s conversions to Gurdjieffian esotericism and Quaker mysticism are just two of the powerful experiences that shaped Jean Toomer’s spiritual life. Importantly, Jean Toomer’s conversions challenge familiar accounts of religious conversion. Rather than a neat from-to narrative, Toomer’s conversions reveal much about the vagaries of religious experience (with its accompanying narratives) that are still a potent thread throughout American life. The desire for redemption (of which conversion is a key component) may cross boundaries of race, nationalities, and religious belief – as suggested by William James – but conversion as a singular transformative event and a sign of inevitable progress has nestled itself at the very center of the American soul. This account of the experience has only served to bolster a psychological sense of American exceptionalism (McAdams 2013, xviii). In other words, conversion narratives are historically wrapped up in white, evangelical expectations of how humanity progresses and increases. Conversion narratives (and subsequently redemption narratives) are therefore inevitably linked with the ideology of “manifest destiny” and its potent sense of moral superiority. Jean Toomer’s conversion experiences both support and trouble these American perceptions of redemption. He was thoroughly American in his pursuit of redemption as self-actualization, but his multitude conversions and deconversions complicate simplistic progress narratives. That Toomer seemingly never experienced an ultimate moment of redemption or conversion does not take away from the fact that he underwent several periods of radical personal transformation throughout his life. His was a redemption much sought, never attained, a kind of unmanifested destiny.

One of these transformative periods resulted from Toomer’s introduction to the spiritual teacher Georges Gurdjieff in December 1923.  In the months following his conversion to Gurdjieff’s teachings, Toomer became an ardent follower and instructor of Gurdjieff’s teaching throughout New York City, including in Harlem, and in Chicago. Gurdjieffianism would continue to spiritually sustain him well into the 1930s. Toomer’s turn to Gurdjieff coincided with the beginnings of his sexual relationship with Margaret Naumberg, the trailblazing educator and wife of his best friend Waldo Frank. These life-altering developments culminated in a pair of deeply ecstatic, mystical experiences. Toomer described these moments of revelation as being “transported from exile into Being. Transport is the exact term… Liberation is the exact term. I was being freed from my ego-prison. I was going to a strange, incredible place where I belonged (Kerman and Eldridge 1987, 158).”  Unfortunately, as Toomer’s ecstatic experiences slowly faded away across the years, so did his relationship with Gurdjieff. Toomer’s biographers refer to this separation of teacher and student as “a death from one life into another (Kerman and Eldridge 1987, 221).”  Toomer became convinced that Gurdjieff had taken advantage of him financially and severed ties with his esteemed teacher in 1935. He was left to continue his spiritual quest on his own.

Despite his break with his most important spiritual teacher, Toomer’s eventual turn to Quakerism brought him to a belief system that, while distinctly Quaker, possessed a definite Gurdjieffian core. His blending of Gurdjieff’s teachings and Quakerism demonstrates the lived hybridity of mystic practice and esotericism. Toomer’s mystic Quakerism celebrated the similarities between the two systems of thought, including an emphasis on direct experience and individual responsibility for one’s own religious development. Toomer believed both practices were founded upon the idea of reaching for Something Greater beyond one’s own consciousness. Always oriented toward the mystical experience, Toomer’s Quaker writings and teachings retained their Gurdjieffian edge. For instance, Toomer’s 1945 statement to the Buckingham Meeting is a distillation of Gurdjieff’s theory of the internal landscape of human beings. “Human beings naturally live in three worlds, the physical, emotional, and mental,” Toomer explains, “Man’s primary need is to find the roots of his life in a fourth world, the spiritual… We are moved towards our divine home.”  Moreover, Toomer continued to adhere to Gurdjieff’s thought regarding “social action.” He believed strongly that human beings had a responsibility to the well-being of the universe, but held no allegiance to political, economic, or social systems (Kerman and Eldridge 1987, 266).  

Toomer’s quest reflects the most intimate anxieties about spiritual and physical belonging. Religious identity remained elusive for Toomer. He remained a man “uprooted” and “exiled” spiritually and racially. Conversion was the always ever unfinished work of his life. In this way, Toomer points us to the losses and ambiguities circulating through late-nineteenth and early twentieth century American stories of “progress” and redemption.