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Mark Whalan, ed. The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2005.296 pp. $38.00 cloth/$20.00 paper.
Correspondence, it has often been noted, forms the backbone of biography. Where else do we get such direct, and at times, shamefully, revealing evidence of a writer's narrative self-invention? In letters we seek to seduce, cajole, impress, flatter, manipulate-and we address our appeals very directly to a specific reader. When a writer's letters are collected, they are collated and historicized, checked for accuracy and thereby taken out of that original and intended context of friendship and intimacy; they are published for the broad consumption of curious readers everywhere. Unintended readers have access to a terrific array of human behaviors, altogether fascinating precisely because we were never intended to see them on display. Who among us does not love to read someone else's mail?
Mark Whalan has done scholars a tremendous service in collecting and editing The Letters of Jean Toomer 1919-1924, for he provides us-at long last-with raw, detailed evidence of Toomer's personal complexity: we see his ambition, his intellectual and philosophical development, his overweening confidence, his protean racial ideology. Moreover, these letters demand that we rethink many of the long-held assumptions about the literary strategies at work in Cane, Toomer's best known and most lasting work. As Barbara Foley's foreword to this volume rightly states, "This collection allows us to imagine far more fully the historical and biographical context from which both the man and his book emerged" (vii). Whalan provides a detailed and nuanced introduction, clear and substantive explanatory footnotes at the end of each letter, and an appendix...