| This study is the final form of an inquiry that began with my looking in quite another direction. Having discovered a stack of volumes of Melvin B. Tolson's long poem Harlem Gallery in 1968, I was delighted to encounter an African-American text as incomprehensible as Pound's Cantos, with which I had been long fascinated. While writing a dissertation on Tolson's poetry, I was astounded to realize that he was embodying George Ivanovich Gurdjieff's cosmos in his poems, for I had been coincidentally reading P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. It was many years before I concluded that for Tolson to have written as individualistically and behaved as eccentrically as he did, there must have been a hidden content to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Using the coded content of Harlem Gallery as a guide, I ascertained which of the Harlem writers had been his teachers, and Jean Toomer did not seem to have been one of them. |
| While mysterious in other ways, Toomer's role with respect to the writers in Harlem is relatively clear: He brought the Gurdjieff system of self-development to Harlem from France-from Gurdjieff himself-and from Greenwich Village-from A. R. Orage. Toomer documented himself thoroughly in a series of autobiographies. Despite this, there are many gaps in his story, particularly in connection with his Harlem days. The effect of Gurdjieff's teachings on the individuals in Toomer's groups will never be easily known. For example, although the prominent muralist and graphic artist Aaron Douglas was an admitted follower of Gurdjieff, it is difficult to delineate that influence in his art, and, strangely, Douglas claimed there to be none. |
| This study begins with a chapter on Jean Toomer as background and then concentrates on Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and Zora Neale Hurston. Primarily, this is because these writers are better known than others who might have been included, for instance, Eric Walrond, Harold Jackman, and Dorothy Peterson. Generally speaking, Thurman, Fisher, Larsen, Schuyler, and Hurston presented many imponderables to their readers, mainly with regard to their personalities and the details of their lives. The critical consensus is that all of them wrote importantly and significantly, but in certain cases not exceptionally. However, as they are known to literary history, the personalities of the Harlem Gurdjieffians were but masks. They wrote their literary works in ciphers that this study decodes for the first time. Rather than their personalities or lives, this study concentrates on the complexities of their literary works. The writers discussed in this first book-length treatment of "objective" art struggled to find |
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