A note on Jean Toomer's Cane and a correction of a big error

Oh no, look at this error I made about how much F. Scott Fitzgerald earned from his short stories.  I wrote that he was making $3,000 per story from the Saturday Evening Post, when the correct figure – early in his career is $900.  This is Fitzgerald’s own record of earnings from 1920, which I found in Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, University of South Carolina Press, 2001, p. xxi:

I had just looked at – but was not at the moment looking at – this page when I wrote that bit, so I had moved some numbers around.  The $3,000 is attached to “Option on my output” from Hollywood.  The idea I was trying to get at was that This Side of Paradise moved Fitzgerald almost instantly from a minimal income to a big pile of money, $18,850, or almost $250,000 in today’s money.

Not that everything he wrote sold, or that everything he wrote was good, but in the 1920s, good American writers – prestige writers – could get rich in a way that was not available before.  That Hollywood cash was part of the story, but this was also the beginning of the great Middlebrowing of the American reading public, a subject I want to return to next week.

There was also avant-garde literature and unpaid literature – the American poetry of the time had plenty of both.  I read one work of fiction in this recent batch that was genuinely far out, commercially hopeless for a number of reasons but pushing hard on what American fiction could do.  That was Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923).

The first third of Cane is a mix of poems and stories set in a small Georgia town in the sugar-growing region, thus the cane of the title.  It makes for a strange landscape.  The stories are all named after women except for the last, “Blood-Burning Moon,” which ends with a lynching, described with as much brutality as the times would allow.  Possibly a bit more – Toomer may have expanded what was allowed.

In the second third there are more poems and stories featuring people from Georgia who have moved to the city, to Washington, D.C., and Chicago, which they find alienating.  In the final third, which is a single story written like a play, educated black men return to Georgia, to teach or reform, and find a different sort of alienation.  This is another of the many, many books inspired in some way by Winesburg, Ohio.  Sherwood Anderson was even a kind of mentor.  I had no idea there were so many.

Nothing I thought about quoting is quite working for me.  The prose moves around too much.  How about a poem, the one just before the story with the lynching.

Portrait in Georgia
Hair – braided chestnut,
            coiled like a lyncher’s rope,
Eyes – fagots,
Lips – old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath – the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
           of black flesh after flame.

This was something new.