1923

YANKEE STADIUM OPENED in 1923. To christen the so-called House that Ruth Built, the portly slugger batted .398 with 41 home runs.

The U.S. economy proceeded at its own torrid pace, growing 14 percent with less than 1 percent inflation; the Dow topped out at 105. In Germany, as inflation sent the currency soaring to a trillion marks per dollar, Adolf Hitler launched a failed putsch from a table in a Munich beer garden. Like many schemes conceived over beer throughout the course of history, Hitler's plan ended in arrest and humiliation.

Marcus Garvey's dreams of founding an empire by returning black Americans to Africa were scuttled by his conviction for mail fraud. The system of royal appointments he had established among supporters would come to an end as well.

Other historical dynasties were unearthed in 1923. In February, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon discovered the "mortuary chamber" of pharaoh "Tut-Ankh-Amen." Later that year, the loot from that find would make its way to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, launching a fashion craze for scarves and slave bangles.

As King Tut emerged from the ground, America's 29th president, Warren Harding, was put into it after dying suddenly of apoplexy. (For decades to come, mothers would warn children against consuming milk and cherries, the rumored cause of the president's death. Warning against incompetent doctors, like those who treated Harding, would be more useful.) It was a novel way of ending a corruption-ridden administration; the same year, the Senate would launch investigations into the Teapot Dome scandal.

The White House began hanging Christmas lights in 1923. The neon tube sign flickered into existence. Many Americans, under the influence of spiritualism and ouija boards, started to see the light.

King Oliver lit up the stage with the young trumpet phenom Louie Armstrong. And George Bernard Shaw'sSt. Joan--saintly woman that she was--moved inexorably toward the pyre each night on New York's Great White Way.

Books

Jean Toomer
Cane
Liveright

TO SAY THAT Jean Toomer's Cane is the greatest novel of the Harlem Renaissance involves two complications: First, this slim collection of prose and verse is only debatably a novel; and second, the author at various points denied that he was black. The second objection is the more interesting of the two, and relates to the history and status of Toomer's family.

The writer's grandfather, Pinckney B.S. Pinchback, was the only African American to serve as acting governor of Louisiana, and later moved to Washington, D.C. Toomer, whose lower-class father disappeared before his birth, grew up with Pinchback in relative prosperity. Upon landing at the University of Wisconsin, Toomer neither dissembled nor discussed his race, positing a distinct identity as "either a new type of man, or the very oldest." Later in life, Toomer would go so far as to deny any African bloodline, claiming that his grandfather had been a reconstruction-era opportunist. In his earlier years, though, Toomer alternated between studying black American life intensively and dismissing the significance of racial classification.

This helps explain the curious sense of alienation that informs the last third of Cane, a story called "Kabnis" about a Northern, educated black man whose attempts to resettle and teach in rural Georgia leave him jittery and unnerved. In 1921, Toomer had acted as interim head of a technical school in Sparta, Ga.--though as a fickle student, he had bounced through some half-dozen colleges and universities, studying everything from sociology to physical education. Although his flirtations with socialism and spiritualism were fleeting, one aspect of his life remained constant: Throughout his early 20s, Toomer wrote prodigiously, amassing a large portfolio of essays, poems, sketches, and stories.

Cane represents a year of such efforts, tied together by a consistency of imagery and of tone. The first third of the book introduces a handful of women whose sexuality sets them afoul of their communities. There's Karintha, who grows up too fast; Beck, the white woman who lives in a shack by the rail tracks with "two Negro sons"; Carma, "strong as a man," whose sexual deception lands her husband Bane on a work gang. The prose is modern and imagistic; the dialogue taken from the demotic. Like an Aaron Copland composition, Cane applies a high-art sensibility to a vocabulary of folk vernacular.

The middle section, set in urban Chicago and Washington, D.C., trenchantly describes the frustration and unease of the black middle class. Again, Toomer describes the way men are consumed and thwarted by their attraction to women--suggesting a certain equality of misery between Northern and Southern blacks.

That Jean Toomer would never again write about the African-American experience--nor ever publish anything, save for a private collection of aphorisms--is one of the many curiosities of this intriguingly inscrutable artist. (Literary critic Darwin T. Turner lays out this history in greater depth in his insightful introduction to a mid-'70s edition of the book.)

He spent the later years of his life as a disciple-instructor of a French spiritual movement, and his many unpublished novels, essays, and memoirs leaned toward polemical autobiography and pedantry. Toomer, however, would have no part in lamenting this fact.

According to him, Cane was consciously designed as a "swan song," an elegy to the agrarian South whose end had come in the form of the great black migration to the North, and industrialization. By that token, Cane--if not the finest novel of the New Negro movement--stands out as a masterpiece of the modern. (Michael Tortorello)