80 THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020
Toomer yearned to birth “a new race in America” among artists in Taos.
THETHEATRE
DESERT DREAMS
Jean Toomer’s unproduced play “A Drama of the Southwest.”
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY R. FRESSON
teacher had finished his writing and his
charges had finished with their chores,
they’d gather in the main house, where
adults made drinks and children had
cookies and ginger ale.
The placid hour wasn’t only for idle
fun. Toomer—a brutally intense, relent-
lessly abstract, comically vain man who
took every quotidian moment as an op-
portunity to philosophize—would ask
probing, pointed questions, turning con-
versation into a kind of Socratic exten-
sion of his teaching. (In 1937, he tried
to sell a book of dialogues with one
young student. “Talks with Peter” was
rejected by several publishers.) Later in
his life, “deserving time” devolved into
a grandiose cover for Toomer’s encroach-
ing alcoholism. “I’ve been working very
hard,” he wrote in a teasing letter to his
wife, Marjorie Content. “Don’t you think
I’m deserving? Don’t you think I might
stop at that tavern and put my head in
just to see if they have any beer?”
During these virus-haunted days of
padding around the house, anxiously
taking in news and “visiting” my friends
via video chat, I keep thinking about
Toomer’s afternoon ceremony. A Sab-
bath atmosphere not unlike the one at
Mill House has sprung up between my
wife and me: we sit around reading and
cooking and listening to music, con-
templating work more than doing it,
calling our moms, pushing each other
fruitlessly to extrapolate on figures (test-
ings and infections, hospitalizations
and deaths) that neither of us fully un-
derstands. Cocktail hour starts a bit
earlier than usual, and ends a bit later.
One of the little tortures of the mo-
ment is the sudden disappearance of
live theatre, and the thought of all the
plays that had been scheduled to open,
some of which, barring an economic or
logistical miracle, will go all but unseen
by large audiences. I’ve tried to console
myself by turning to plays that have
seldom—sometimes never—been seen,
but which I love nonetheless. Some are
intentional “closet plays,” meant for
reading rather than seeing; others are
simply interesting attempts, still wait-
ing for their turn onstage.
One such strange but promising
specimen is Toomer’s odd, keening
1935 play “A Drama of the Southwest,”
written, I’m sure, between many “de-
serving times” but never completed. I’d
love to see it staged someday, perhaps
clipped into a one-act and presented
on a bill with Toomer’s other little-
known plays. He was an earnest dra-
matist; the knotty contradictions of his
life and his ideas seemed to rhyme with
the dialectical possibilities of playwrit-
ing. Still, his attempts at having his
plays produced were failures—as were
many literary endeavors after his clas-
sic 1923 work, “Cane,” a quilt of poems,
prose, and drama set in black Georgia.
Two versions of the manuscript of
“A Drama of the Southwest” were skill-
fully collaged in a 2016 critical edition
by the scholar Carolyn Dekker. In her
introductory essay, Dekker presents the
O
n late afternoons, after his work
was done, the modernist poet, nov-
elist, religious omnivore, and occasional
playwright Jean Toomer observed a
ritual that he called “deserving time.”
Much of the latter half of his life was
spent in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,
north of Philadelphia, on his property,
Mill House. On the grounds, alongside
his family, Toomer housed a revolving
retinue of devotees who came to learn
his home-brewed adaptation of the spir-
itualist George Gurdjieff ’s mystical prac-
tices; the students also performed man-
ual labor, a classic—and, for Toomer,
quite convenient—aspect of Gurdjieff ’s
“Work.” At four o’clock, when the
