Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Roots

  Chapter 2 - Early Days in Uptown

  Chapter 3 - Fortier

  Chapter 4 - Tulane

  Chapter 5 - Columbia University

  Chapter 6 - Cajun Country

  Chapter 7 - Hunter and Columbia

  Chapter 8 - The Army and Puerto Rico

  Chapter 9 - A Writer Emerges

  Chapter 10 - Back Home in New Orleans

  Chapter 11 - Decline and Fall

  Chapter 12 - Final Journey

  Chapter 13 - Publication

  Chapter 14 - Fame

  Chapter 15 - Toward the Heavens

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright Page

  For Danievie, Elliott, and Liam

  The book sold well, we understand,

  Although the cover itself would command

  A buyer’s attention: a large, abstract bee

  Crushing a butterfly with a typewriter key.

  —John Kennedy Toole, from “The Arbiter” (unpublished)

  Introduction

  The life and death of John Kennedy Toole is one of the most compelling stories of American literary biography. After writing A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole corresponded with Robert Gottlieb of Simon and Schuster for two years, exchanging edits and commentary. Unable to gain Gottlieb’s approval, Toole gave up on the novel, determining it a failure. Years later, he suffered a mental breakdown, took a two-month journey across the United States, and finally committed suicide on an inconspicuous road outside Biloxi, Mississippi. Years later, his mother found his manuscript in a shoebox and submitted it to various publishers. After many rejections, she cornered author Walker Percy, who found it a brilliant novel and facilitated its publication. It became an immediate sensation, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, twelve years after Toole’s death.

  Since then, A Confederacy of Dunces has been hailed as the quintessential New Orleans novel. As many New Orleanians attest, no other writer has captured the essence of the city more accurately than Toole. And to this day the city celebrates its honored author. A statue of the protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, stands outside the old D. H. Holmes Department Store. Characters from the book make Mardi Gras appearances. And any reader of the novel who visits the French Quarter will certainly smile at the ubiquitous sight of a Lucky Dog cart.

  But the novel exceeds the confines of regionalism. While Toole roots the characters and the plot in New Orleans, his narrative approach reflects influences from British novelists Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, and Charles Dickens. Within American literature Toole is closer to Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman than he is to iconic Southern writers Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. In the scope of Southern literature, Confederacy seems an aberration. But within the scope of the modern novel, it is at home in its dark humor and acerbic wit.

  Its continued success offers the most powerful testimony to its ability to reach past the bounds of that swath of land between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. To this day, it continues to garner readers. It has been translated into more than twenty-two languages and remains in print all over the world. Teachers and professors use the novel in their classes, from high school lessons on satire to graduate courses in creative writing. Plans for a film version of the book have been in development since its publication. And it recurrently appears on the “best of” lists periodically published in popular media. Notably, author Anthony Burgess places A Confederacy of Dunces alongside For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Catcher in the Rye in his New York Times article “Modern Novels; the 99 Best.” Clearly, A Confederacy of Dunces is more than a humorous romp through a Southern city; it is a classic of modern literature.

  And its place is rightly earned. In the foreword to the novel, Walker Percy describes it as a compilation of Western thought and culture, from Thomas Aquinas to Don Quixote to Oliver Hardy. He considers the menagerie of characters a crowning achievement. And he recognizes it as a comedy that exceeds mere humor and ascends to the highest form of commedia. But as Percy celebrates the great accomplishments of the novel, he grapples with the detectable sadness in the book, one that is rooted in the biography of Toole. Percy writes, “The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author—his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty two.” Henceforth, readers of Confederacy have negotiated this intriguing paradox of the tragicomedy; the reader’s laughter is never far from the tinge of sadness in remembering Toole’s tragic end. More so than most novels, A Confederacy of Dunces prompts the reader to ponder the life and death of the author. And while his suicide is well known, his personality, his struggles, and his triumphs, in essence, his life has hitherto remained an obscure entry within the collection of biographies of twentieth-century novelists.

  Some critics may defend Toole’s marginal place within the canon of American literature. Having only one novel of merit, he is easily dismissible as a one hit wonder. While talented, he does not provide scholars with a breadth of novels to dissect. But such criticism has rarely quelled biographical interest in Harper Lee, Emily Brontë, or Margaret Mitchell. And if we base our measure on quality, then the prolific writer has no more value within the literary canon than the individual who composes a single masterpiece.

  In fact, interest in Toole has never waned since the publication of Confederacy. As early as 1981, writers and scholars recognized the remarkable story of his life and its place within literary history. Until her death in 1984, Toole’s mother, Thelma Toole, received many requests of permission to write a biography of her son, and she patently declined them. But in her reply to the request of James Allsup, an acquaintance of Toole from his army days in Puerto Rico who had since become a professor of English, Thelma outlined the essential rigors required of any Toole biographer:Dear Mr. Allsup:

  Your qualifications to write a biography of my son are excellent, but, if I granted your request this is what it would imply: you would have to live in my home for several months, perhaps, a year, perhaps, more; then, you would have to read carefully a wealth of material, pertaining to my son; then, you and I would decide what to use, what not to use; then, we would begin collaboration.

  After listing these stipulations, she politely declined his request.

  To any established professor, Thelma’s hypothetical expectations would be absurd. But she accurately portrays the difficult grounds a Toole biographer must navigate. Even for his mother, who usually appeared quite omniscient in regard to her son, composing the narrative of Toole’s life was a daunting task. She attempted on one occasion but got no further than a few pages.

  Such challenges became painfully evident in the first biography of Toole, Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole, written by René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy. While Nevils and Hardy provide readers with an unprecedented resource in that they published the correspondence between Gottlieb and Toole, albeit without Gottlieb’s permission, they also depict Toole as a man suffering from an Oedipal complex, suppressed homosexuality, alcoholism, madness, and an appetite for promiscuity. Toole becomes a caricature of the fatal artist. While some reviewers forgave Nevils and Hardy for their indiscretion, many friends of Toole found the book insidious. Toole’s friend Joel Fletcher angrily observed, “The authors have so carelessly written half-truths and untruths about a friend who is not here to defend himself.”

  Troubled by the sensationalism in Ignatius Rising, Fletcher authored Ken and Thelma, in which he offered a balanced biographical sketch of Toole, grounded in interviews and his own memories. But as Fletcher admits
, his book “is a memoir, not a biography.” In Ken and Thelma, Fletcher writes, “A good biography of Toole is yet to be written. I hope that a future biographer of Toole will find this account a useful and accurate document.” Indeed, he has offered the most credible work on Toole to date, and he has given me indispensible guidance for this book.

  In my pursuit to understand Toole, I neither aimed to diagnose him, nor cast him in the mold of the tortured artist. In reading his letters, his unpublished poems and stories, and the same novels on his bookshelf at the time of his death, in interviewing his friends, family, and acquaintances, I have sought to understand Toole on his own terms. I have sought to compose a biographical narrative in which Toole would recognize himself if he were alive to read it.

  Through this exploration, one sees Toole in his complexity. At times, the abnormal circumstances of his rearing and his social marginalization elicit sympathy. At other times, his sense of superiority and his curt comments make him deplorable. And yet, his friends, even those he offended, clearly enjoyed his stories and his wit. All the while, he struggled to define himself as either a scholar or a fiction writer, as either a son bound by filial duty or an independent man. In the end, his life exhibits a single case of a man full of humor and laughter, who strived for greatness but could not find a way to cope with his demons.

  Of course, despite my best efforts, his mother, Thelma, will always be the primary hand that has shaped the way we understand his life. It was at her choosing which documents survived and which ones were discarded. While she saved miscellanea from his school days—blue books and math homework—she destroyed his suicide note. In interviews, she offered a nostalgic vision of her son, an emphatic, one-dimensional portrayal of her unrecognized genius, from birth to death. But she rarely discussed his mental illness. While she proclaims his mind a “Mt. Parnassus,” she withholds insight into the earthquake that reduced him to rubble.

  Avoiding such discomfiting moments in the life of her son, Thelma preferred to recall the moments she idealized, usually moments from his childhood. Reminiscing over the hours she spent gazing at her baby, she said, “Those eyes. Those magnificent eyes. Not only beautiful, but lu-minant. A light in them.” Of course, there was no way for his mother to foresee the tragic end thirty-one years later. There was no way for her to foresee her grown son sitting in that car on a country road outside Biloxi, a garden hose channeling exhaust fumes into the cabin, extinguishing the light from his eyes.

  But what mother, holding her newborn child, could imagine such horror at a time of such bliss? No, the shadow of his suicide did not loom over him as he slept in his cradle, as he swam with friends in the pool at Audubon Park, as he ventured to New York to attend Columbia University, as he taught English to Puerto Rican recruits, or as he composed his literary masterpiece. Only in retrospect does his suicide become the dark backdrop to his brilliance. In his lifetime he touched the lives of his family, his friends, and his students with his tenderness and humor. And through his singular novel he continues to touch the lives of readers all over the world with his ability to illustrate the most ridiculous, yet oddly realistic characteristics of humanity. And so, while his demise came at his own hand, his life story deserves the understanding and the celebration that we offer any writer who has left an enduring contribution to our world.

  Chapter 1

  Roots

  On a Sunday afternoon in 1963 in a small barracks room at Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico, Sergeant John Kennedy Toole rested his fingers on the keyboard of a borrowed typewriter and stared into the emptiness of a blank page. For years he had dreamt of becoming a writer, but his attempts were fraught with disappointment. The novel he wrote at sixteen failed to win a writing contest and now sat in a box under his bed in New Orleans collecting dust. He deemed the poems and short stories he wrote in graduate school unworthy. And his summer before boot camp, which he dedicated to writing, yielded nothing substantial. Still, dozens, maybe hundreds of colorful characters populated his imagination, all developed from his observations of people. Weaving these characters into a narrative proved the great challenge.

  So, once again, he approached the defining line where his story would either take flight or crash into obscurity. But this time his circumstances were different. His station in Puerto Rico offered him relief from the financial and familial pressures of his civilian life. And living one thousand miles away from home, he could ponder the unique ways of his city, New Orleans. Distanced and unburdened, Toole seized the moment. He recalled a character he had been developing for years, a behemoth of contradictions, a mustached man of refined intellect and grotesque manners, a highbrow buffoon with mismatched eyes, offering the perfect distorted lens through which to examine his city.

  He broke the silence of the room with the first few keystrokes, sending forth the fat medievalist Ignatius Reilly into the carnival of New Orleans life. The language started to pour out. Pent up energies of a decade flowed, filling page after page as he conjured the characters of his past and spun a tale of absurdity and hilarity. And over the next few months, a thrilling sense emerged in him that he was writing something readable, something publishable. His future success, the rave reviews, the devoted readers, the accolades and awards that would come, were entirely unknown to him. Nonetheless, as he cranked away at the typewriter in his small private room, as that fluttering music of the novelist danced out of the open windows, borne aloft in the Caribbean breeze, he ascended to his pinnacle moment. He crafted his masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces. And all the while he dreamt of his beloved New Orleans, that ark of culture, clinging to the banks of the Mississippi River. “The Paris of the South,” “the birthplace of jazz,” and “America’s most interesting city,” his hometown moved to its own rhythm, beckoning all the varieties and colors of humanity into the streets, where together they stirred the traditions of Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and America, to create sounds and flavors all their own, making a world unto itself.

  It is from this cultural complexity that the life and artistic vision of John Kennedy Toole came into being. As his friend Joel Fletcher once observed, Toole “was indigenous New Orleans. It was part of the fabric of who he was.” Indeed, Toole spent much of his life discerning the unique people of his city, from flamboyant French Quarter drifters to elderly downtown women who yacked away over department store counters. He developed a sensitive ear and a sharp eye for the subtle quirks in a personality, even in a city brimming with eccentrics. But the foundations of his uncanny insights into a place that has fascinated and eluded writers for centuries actually began long before his birth. For New Orleans was far more than the place where he had grown up. He was a native son of the city, hailing from the European lines that merged in the expanding neighborhoods of the antebellum metropolis. His ancestors came from France, Spain, and Ireland, and all became New Orleanians, planting family roots in the wet soil of southern Louisiana.

  Toole’s earliest ancestor to the New World was his mother’s great-grandfather, Jean François Ducoing, who came to the city from France near the turn of the nineteenth century. Ducoing gained local fame after “skillfully [handling] the solitary mortar” under the command of Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Toole’s mother proudly documented this deed in a baby book she kept for her son, but she seemed to overlook other historical accounts. For example, Ducoing was an associate of the legendary pirate Jean Lafitte. Both a romanticized outlaw and a fellow hero at the Battle of New Orleans, Lafitte led a gang of Baratarians who smuggled slaves and other goods taken from Spanish ships that eventually ended up in the markets of New Orleans. Toole’s honored ancestor had some involvement in such exploits, ranging from insurance fraud of a marine vessel to the founding of Lafitte’s sham government in Galveston. But such intrigue was not lost on Toole. Perhaps stretching the truth of his lineage, he once declared to one of his friends that he was not only the descendent of the celebrated Jean Ducoing, but he was also related to the famed corsair Jean Lafitte. />
  In addition to his French ancestor, Toole’s grandmother on his father’s side, Mary Orfila, was the daughter of a Spanish commission merchant, who came to New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century. And thus Toole had the two primary pillars of New Orleans European heritage: the French, who founded the city in 1718, and the Spanish, who governed it over forty years. Their descendants were dignified by the classification of “Creole” and traditionally honored as “pure” New Orleanians.

  But Toole’s privileged ancestry was tempered by the earthy influx of the Irish. Both his mother and his father had ancestors from Ireland that had come to New Orleans during the potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Initially seen as a source of cheap labor, many Irish immigrants ended up digging canals waist deep in the swamps behind the city, a job determined too hazardous for valuable slaves. The Irish settled south of the old city, along the Mississippi River in an area that became known as the Irish Channel. Surviving great hardships, they eventually thrived, and they made a lasting impact on the unique downtown accent called Yat, which is resonant of dialects heard in the boroughs of New York City.

  Toole’s mixed lineage tells part of the story of New Orleans—how it grew by waves of immigration and how ethnicities established their own neighborhoods in which they kept their traditions alive. In this way New Orleans mirrors some of the great port cities of Baltimore, New York, and Boston. But eventually, as families merged and moved, ethnic lines blurred. While his mother’s side proudly carried the Creole heritage of the French name Ducoing and his father’s side carried the Irish name Toole, in the late 1800s the Ducoings and the Tooles ended up neighbors in an area of the city called the Faubourg Marigny, just outside the old city. The fact that a Creole and the son of an Irish immigrant were neighbors, signifies, on one hand, the decline of the Creole stature in the economy of New Orleans, but on the other hand speaks to the ability of the working class to carve a respectable place for themselves in the city, despite the old social order. And each of these families had a child born to them near the turn of the century: the Toole boy and the Ducoing girl grew up one block away from each other on Elysian Fields Avenue, the same “raffish” street that Tennessee Williams set his ill-fated romance A Streetcar Named Desire.