82 Church Street,

Asheville, N. C.,
January 30, 1924.

Dear Jean:

Hear! How all these goodly people came together
and voted to live in peace. How they made pacts,
mutual checks and surrenders, that they might the
better fill their bellies, and sleep the sounder,
and in time develop that pleasant convulsion of
the muscles, that baring of the teeth, which is
known as laughter. And, thanks to the skill and
the fidelity of their routine, we could feel cer-
tain that three lines scratched on a μανηματική
piece of pulp would hunt out the one person among
hordes, or the pressure of a certain key would
bring vast life-serving mechanisms into play. This
we shall call an edifice, a bulwark of iron and
rock; and the flames overtopping this edifice, we
shall call love.

No, we shall not stop to curse the grinners and the
smirkers, for they carry their own distress in-
separably, like a hump. They pot one sorry little
flower, they lift the window and place it on the
sill, and the flower withers. It stands, as stiff
and parched as its supporting stick; and placing it
to the nose you smell the baked clay. Their curse
is in their solitude, which follows them like a
shadow. Their curse is in the meanness of the world,
the paleness of art, the dullness of their fellows.
Their curse, hear me, is in the way they eye their
women.

PROSERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

Dear Kenneth,

Ah, there was a time when lilacs were her breath before my door. In this cadenced pattern you will notice that I have the symbols of all beginnings. And no flower spread sunward from the ground, if not to call me from one dream to a sweeter one. The flowers, her breath, and that portal were trinitied, haoled to give soft hostage to my supplications. From my window I could see great mountains curve simply to display their lovliness. Likewise with the rivers, all misty things, and the shifting clouds. The rains blessed, thunder and lightning challenged. While snow, yes, you know it, the silver snow, silent, falling... But now I know that no spade can ever clear this ground. Be confessed, therefore. To Chemicals, rock. And lift but thy smallest finger up to God.

Find then in me, dear Ken, one heart.

Two friends, men of wealth and culture, fed up with the transitory nature of all wordy life, its vanities and inevitable corruptions, the way in which all good things are converted to their opposites, were their possessions driven to abandon those things which they possess, quit the world, and retire to a forest, pledged to ceaselessly pursue an ascetic's life toward final liberation. They lived on roots and berries, observed the necessary sacrifices, meditated, and denied sleep as if it were the great temptation. Each one outdid the other in their personal severities. Yet never had they been so gentle towards each other. And towards the beasts and flowers they were so kind that all creatures lost their fear of them, and even greeted them by their first names: Hart and Gorham. Each year they increased their disciplines until, finally, the gods themselves were won by their pure devotion. So, one evening at sunset as they sat on the ground, the Sun himself descended that he might grant them superhuman powers. The whole world blazed up and blinded them. For a moment they lost consciousness, but on recovering, knew the being who was present with them. The great Sun said: "For their severities thou art granted by the wish of Gods, power over the three worlds and the four seasons. Also, thou hast the power to curse. But for these things must thou give an offering to nature. Quit, therefore, thy hermit life, and seek you each of you a wife, and therein plant children." So the two friends bowed down in reverence and vowed to do his bidding. Next morning each set out, and, after much wondering, found a woman, married her, and then returned to their dwellings. And each planted as he was commanded. In due time the increase was expected. They decided to celebrate. The wives prepared the food and served them. But each woman's hair had been undone, and strands of it fell into the dishes. Both men were quick to notice this uncleanliness. And, without forthought, they cursed each other. Said Gorham: For this uncleanliness I curse that you be transported hence before the wamb gives birth. Said Hart: For this uncleanliness I

2

curse that you revert to what thou wast formerly. Each charged, howe-
that the other's wife had let the hairs contaminate their food. Hence,
he who was guilty had no cause or right to curse the other. They grew
overwrought and from them flowed a torrent of curses. Said Gorham: Thou
shalt become the slave who served you. Said Hart: Thou shall become a
salve unto that slave. Said Gorham: Thou shall become my dog
when I am in that state. Said Hart: Thou shall become the hairs upon my
back. And with these cries still ringing in the forest, they
departed from each other. Two days before the first infant was born,
the curses took effect. Hart was transported to the city he had left.
Likewise, Gorham. They met as usual upon a common street, in friendliness.
Wishing to recall their curses, they had no sooner met than Hart became
the slave who served him. Gorham became a slave unto that slave. Hart
became his dog. Gorham became the hairs upon that dog. Thus they exist,
and exist forever, subject to slow mutations, unless the Sun god pity
them and undo the mischief.

JEAN TOOMER COLLECTION

Andover,
New Jersey,
February 26, 1925.

Dear Jean,

Some years ago I wrote you a hasty postcard promising further revelations. But since then many Chinamen have flowed beneath the bridges - and to-day I take up an ancient document on a book of my forgotten youth, and read it with the poignancy of sweet lavendar,

All told, I believe now that your article was better than it will ever get credit for, for it is as ungainly, as ill-formed as that Shape which guarded the key to Milton's hell. It is a crooked and halting Thing. It has the signal distinction of pointing out conflict by quotation from a story dealing with precisely the conflict which you point out. It has the signal distinction of recognizing, which Seaver did not, that I am not a "potential satirist," and why this is so.

I do wish, as a matter of objective interest, that you had gone into the matter of conflicts more at length and more in general. For it remains undoubtedly true that morons, imbeciles, and Christians seem to be the only types free of conflict, and they gain this unity only at times. Indeed, so far as external life goes, it is unthinkable except in terms of conflict - or better, it is *unlivable*. Everything is normal in life is an adjustment, a poise, a balance - and all these words imply the neutralization of opposites. ... I sometimes wonder whether your distinction might not have been drawn differently: and we might situate the failure of my stories in the fact that *they* deal with an *ethical conflict* which *has not been resolved into an artistic unity*. I never found the creative symbol, the emotional unit which would include logical opposites. And thus, in the last analysis, I am a "case," my stories were "symptomatic," and you were *always* justified in saying that the *always* machinery of psychoanalysis could be applied to me.

Can a book, perhaps, be one's cure? The horror which came over me after my volume was issued was something like the sudden realization of a ghastly crime one has committed in one's sleep. I cannot understand this. The reviews were much more favourable than I had anticipated; I received exactly the hundred dollars in returns which I had figured on. Yet something undosingly had occurred - and I doubt whether I shall ever understand, unless I find it listed among the "cases," just why a melancholia and self-sickness descended upon me at that time with a vigour which I had never before experienced - and this mood has sat upon me all winter, forgotten only at moments of a purely physical exclamation, or even hilarity, which came spooking over me at times at the felling of a tree, or the discovery of a formula - or most often for no reason at all.

Quae cum ita sint, I should be even more of a case to resent your calling me one - and thus I salute you as having, in a muddled and unconvincing manner, touched the mainspring of my

2

volume. But, fax perhaps for my peace of mind, I am inclined to xxxxx see the difficulty as a technical one, and believe simply that my anxiety arose from the feeling of loss which a man must have if he suddenly discovered himself deprived of speech. For the completion of my volume xxxxx had a pronounced psychic parallel: something in me was finished, and this something was precisely a mode of writing developed through several years of practice and living. I stood, therefore, suddenly subtracted from. Since then I have, to carry out the analogy, been learning a new language - and I am made uncomfortable to recall that I once possessed one which, whatever its shortcomings, was certainly more refined and xxxxx better directed than these rumblings of a new beginning. Indeed, in the last few months I have meditated and uttered more platitudes (read, truths inadequately imagined) than since my high-school days when I made a hundred in Latin.

Out of it all I arrived, sullenly yet without choice, at the feeling that I can do nothing but write an objective novel. I am, in other words, exactly at that point at which I stood when writing the story of The White Oxen (or rather, just after finishing it) xxxxx except that, instead of trying to convert the novel of character into a lyric, I look from the lyric back towards the novel of character. The poetic drama is, of course, the one solution of this difficulty which has existed in the past, and thus it is no mere accident that I have, this winter, been reading the works of Shakespeare with a new astonishment. The greatest art contains the germs of all possible directions, all specializations - and this work of art in itself will be found as the goal to which any deviation, itself following a cycle, will lead back. Inxshakap But it is hard to affirm such things in public: for the discoveries which we sweat for have already been handed gratis to those who xxxxx the imagination to rebel, and we can at best utter the already known, glumly aware that at bottom we somehow know it more soundly, more fully, than those who will so readily xxxxx brand it as old stuff.

Thus, xxxxx critically, my search is for a language, a mode of presenting my convictions in such a way that the distinction between xxxxx the inheritance and the rediscovery of tradition may be felt. While poetically, I must somehow adapt the virtues of the poetic drama fax into a time which does not care for the poetic drama as such. Both these, you will observe, are questions of method - but there is a philosophy somehow implicit within them, our language and our thoughts filling themselves out concomitantly. Technique and Wakkamakungxa weltanschauung are the same.

To-day, under the attack of these first March gales, our house is like a ship at sea. And yet again, these first March gales have for me, who have earned my spring, somewhat the xxxxx consolation of the first robin.

Sincerely,

1447 North Dearborn St

Chicago 111

Jan 7 29

Dear Miss Moore,

I am very glad that four of my reflections have particular value for The Dial.

a good
Yes, I think Reflections an appropriate title.

In the last one, I have substituted another word for evil. Or, rather, I substituted another beginning aim phrase. The idea I wish to convey is that the wish to exist without effort is the root of man's abnormality. Evil, sin, - these are terms with fixed moral connotations. Abnormality, which has psychological associations, is perhaps the better term. I think the condition caused mainly by the wish to exist without effort is serious enough, acute enough, to warrant the use of this word.

This four reflection is difficult to phrase just right in few words. Here are two additional phrasings:

The wish to have something for nothing, to exist without effort, is the source of man's abnormality.
(inheres in) *man*

Abnormality arises from (man's) wish to have something for nothing, to exist without effort.

It is difficult for me to tell which conveys my meaning best, which is best phrased. Whichever you select will have my approval.

JEAN TOOMER COLLECTION

Reflections
by
Jean Toomer

A running man cannot take a new direction.

Whatever stands between you and that person,
stands between you and yourself.

What most people mean by self-development is that
which will make them appear as they wish to appear.

Man is abnormal because of the wish to have something
for nothing, to exist without effort.

JEAN TOOMER COLLECTION

78 Bank Street,
New York City,
April 11, 1934.

Dear Jean,

Between odds and ends of hack, I snatch a
moment to answer your letter, which I wanted to answer long
before this.

With all that you say I am in agreement, par-
ticularly as regards the matter of "proportion" with respect to
cooperation and competition. It is unquestionable that a society
could as easily go to rot on cooperation as ours has
done on competition. The main thing is to be moving away from
the emphasis which is uppermost, when this emphasis has gained
ascendancy enough to be oppressive. And the sad thing about an
attempt to handle contemporary issues with reference to the
documents from the past lies precisely in the fact that the
proportions prevailing in a past era are the first thing that
vanishes from the documents. If a small class, for instance,
happens to have expressed itself in literature, and a large class
through being illiterate happens to have expressed itself in
dancing, when our savants examine this era they find nothing
but the literature remaining, hence must offer it as the "essence"
of the times. I have become convinced that such accidents, how-
ever little they may be liked by the champions of "scientific
method," play a major role in the accumulation of "the
facts."

As for your proposal that we round out acquiescent art and corrective art by a synthetic third, "creative art": to a degree every art work exemplifies this synthesis, since no work can be "purely" acquiescent or "purely" corrective. The distinction is but a logical one, hence must vanish in any specific art-organism. Again: it is merely a question of proportion. One can see the whole issue in the present status of "revolutionary" art: its basic incentive, the cry for "emancipation," for "greater freedom," arises out of precisely the commercial ethic which it would renounce. For as Strachey well indicates in The Coming Struggle for Power, the whole religion of liberty is bound up with the struggle for free markets that began with the decay of feudalism.

What are you doing? Don't forget to look me up
if and when you return to N. Y. In case I am not here, I can
always be reached at Andover, N. J.

Best greetings,

Dear Ken,

I am afraid that your answer to my equation question is a compound
of bad philosophy and bare statement.

For:

JEAN TOOMER COLLECTION

I cannot accept your line: Wisdom is the circle we take in getting
back to the starting point. For it seems to me that this is a
definition of individual life. But wisdom and life are by no means
interchangeable. Wisdom indeed begins at some point in that circle,
or, rather, some point in that circle is the inception of wisdom.
And I can conceive of no better, no more probable point than just
this one, viz. the point at which we become aware that our individual
existence is the circle we take in getting back to the starting
point. If one assumes that the beginning and end are nothing, then
it is possible that human knowledge reaches it high water mark at
a point mid-way between them. In this case, you would know more
than a child, yea, shortly would you exceed the sage in knowledge.
If, on the contrary, one holds that the beginning and end alike
contain all things in essence, then wisdom is low ebb at a point
equidistant from them. And consequently you would know less than a
child, and less than your wise man. For myself, these conclusions
are not valid, for the reason that I do not hold birth to be the
beginning, though a sage at death may be near the end. And, further,
dear lion, it seems to me sheer poppycock, your writing that when
it gets down to a matter of essence, the child knows as much as the
sage. This view either falsely augments the child, or diminishes
the sage. In either case, it places too large a badge upon the
middle-aged. I assume that you have experienced children. The sage
then, is the x in your equation. And the middle-aged, as related to
yourself, might profitably stand examination.

To continue:

One experience added to another experience is not 1 plus 1 equals
2. Hence here you have not met my question. Moreover I doubt that
you have ever added several experiences in the way you say you have.
More as to this when I have your definition of experience.

Now, Ken, damn all this wordiness and specious mentalism; a wealth
of connotation without the loss of denotation. Who is the rare
m subject of this combination? I personally believe that denotation
is lost in connotation in the same way that essence is submerged in
multiplicity. And, to reverse the process, it is only by paring
connotation that we lay a lean hand on your knowledge.

JEAN TOOMER COLLECTION

Dear Ken,

In writing that equation piece I desired to stimulate that mind
of yours to thought and phrases, and, in turn, to be stimulated by
it. That my effort was successful will be seen from the following.

"Wisdom is the circle we take in getting back to the starting point." A damn fine thought, and finely put. In our own age, Freud seems to hold a similar one. Among the ancients, Plato, and numerous Hindu philosophers. But, given these gentlemen in conversation, it would not be long, I think, before certain differences would spring up. For though Plato and Freud might agree as to the course we take, it is very probable that they would not hold a starting point in common. Hence, different interpretations of the course itself. There remaining, nothing but the course's shape for them to agree about. It is just possible that I ascribe to "Wisdom etc" in a like manner. Some day we must dig up our starting points, and if these be similar, then we must draw the implications from our "circle". But even if these points be unlike, I'll have a sly joy in following your circle, in gently prodding you should you ever leave it.

It seems to me that you have slipped the traces in your letter. Lets see. Let us give the equation 1 plus 1 equals 2 as the starting point. Now if "Wisdom is the circle etc" then it follows that the wise man is he knows this bare equation, that is, the equation with no connotation whatsoever. The child knows this bare equation. And, as you say, "when it gets down to a matter of essence, the child knows as much as the sage". But you know more than a child because you are aware of connotation. (If you know more than a child, then necessarily you are wiser than a sage. Well!) This is like saying that the farther one gets away from an essence, the more one knows of it. That is, the less one knows of an essence, the more one knows of it. Which, dear lion, is a sweet absurdity. And upon this absurdity you found all human richness! It seems to me that you are faced with the following propositions: Essence (knowledge of essence) is the starting point and goal. Me, who are mid-way, have less knowledge (or at least no greater knowledge) than those who are at the starting point and goal. Essence is the starting point. Multiplicity is the goal. Hence we who are aware of multiplicity have a greater knowledge than those who are aware of essence. Which one do you choose?

(To hold, as you have done in one place, that one may possess connotation with no loss of denotation (multiplicity with no loss of essence) is to have a mental formula, but I can find nothing in my own experience that corresponds to it. Therefore I doubt (until you have demonstrated the contrary) that it fits any reality within yourself. In fact, it seems to me that the terms, in themselves, involve contradiction.

I await your definition of experience.