Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

  Regardless of his mother’s intrusions, Toole gained a reputation for being an enjoyable date—a good dancer, polite, always well dressed. It was a reputation he carried into college and beyond. But romantic interests always seemed secondary to his drive to achieve some form of greatness. What that form was still remained unclear. However, in high school, his energetic exploration of writing styles suggested a particular direction.

  Toole’s academic essays show his interest in both popular culture and history. In “Television, Tomorrow’s Entertainment,” he returned to the idea that he muttered to John Geiser on their way to school in kindergarten. Citing historical and statistical evidence, and noting the decline in attendance at cinemas, Toole argues for the growing trend and popularity of television. He declares at the end of the short essay, “Television is here to stay and soon it may be the world’s chief entertainment.” He was acutely perceptive. Around the time he wrote this paper, the Golden Age of television began, a time of innovation and experimentation in the medium.

  Toole also understood well the language of patriotism, and for his teachers he embraced it in his writing, showing energy and vision. In a short essay on the Louisiana Purchase, he casts the American heartland in picturesque detail:On the Great Plains spring up the graceful, golden “gift of God”—wheat. Beneath the fertile surface lay the extensive pools of blue-black oil lying dormant until the greedy drill should pierce their slumber.

  These are the same plains that still bear the wagon tracks of the 1850s in the furious rush westward. Up from the virgin forests have sprung the great industrial and commercial centers. Above the banks of the Mississippi rise the smoke-blacked factory towers representing the nation’s strength....

  At the tip of this cornucopia lies New Orleans, the insuperable gateway to the Mississippi and America’s region of prosperity.

  After surveying the vast regions of the country, he casts New Orleans as the beginning and the end of it all.

  He wrote his high school essays in idealized language about America and American history, which was quite common for the historical narrative offered at the time. In an essay titled “Democracy Is What We Make of It,” the young Toole explores the citizen’s responsibility to uphold the principles of “the greatest nation of the earth” and overcome “Communist tyranny.” Without cynicism or humor he expresses a loyal affirmation of the creed of the country. The overtly patriotic voice he used in his class assignments does not indicate the skepticism he may have felt toward the ideal vision of the United States and the Cold War mentality.

  In college he would directly undermine such idealistic precepts of the nation, a sentiment that eventually culminated in his character Ignatius Reilly whose New Orleans–centric vision of the world is laughable and who finds the country lacking in “geometry and theology.” And Toole would also mock simplistic notions of government and economies, humorously voiced in Confederacy through the character Claude Robichaux, who is convinced anyone that opposes him is a “comuniss.” While Toole maintained a patriotic line in his classwork, early traces of this cynical tendency appear outside of his schoolwork. In 1951 he joined the staff of the school newspaper, making his entry through a satire edition titled Ess and Bee, presumably an inversion of B.S. Taking on the character of a Russian ring-toss athlete Ivan Vishivsky O’Toole of the Russian institution Liquidate University, he offers testimony of losing to a Fortier student at the world ring toss championship held in “Upper Lower Slobbovia.” O’Toole testifies in his Russian dialect:Vhy, oh vhy, does effryting haff to hoppin to me?

  Chust when I t’ought I had der voild’s ring toss championship in der bag, Fortier’s Villie Harrison (dorty capitalist) came from behind to win hands and feets.

  Da, I vas sure dat I had von it, ven dot slob made a beautivul 10-foot toss mit der rink, and I vent down in dorty democratic defeat. Siberia, heer I come.

  This is the first documented instance of his writing in a dialect, and his interest in commenting on current events through satire shines. In this case, he cast the competition between communism and democracy through the ridiculous metaphor of ring tossing. After writing this article, he stayed on with the newspaper until he graduated.

  Toole employed the use of dialect in some of his creative writing in high school as well. In the John Kennedy Toole Papers at Tulane University (called the Toole Papers hereafter), there is an undated manuscript titled “Going Up” that is likely from this time period. His name appears on this manuscript as Kennedy Toole, which he started using again in print when he became the managing editor of Silver and Blue in his senior year. Told in the voice of an elevator operator who speaks in the downtown New Orleans accent, the narrator tells of a serendipitous event when he accidentally left a lady on the twelfth floor, although she asked for the thirteenth. He feared her reprisals, but because his mistake resulted in her securing employment, everything ended for the best. Despite the flaws of “Going Up,” it demonstrates Toole’s early interest in capturing the cadence of speech in the commoner of New Orleans.

  These stabs at fiction and satire may have been a warm-up to his watershed moment as an aspiring author. By 1953 the Tooles had moved to 2226 Cambronne Street in a less desirable neighborhood on the edges of Uptown, away from the lush green archways and park spaces. Thelma later explained to reporter Dalt Wonk that they moved in order to be closer to Fortier, but Cambronne was farther away from Fortier than Webster Street was. Most likely, their move had more to do with a decrease in income. And leaving the heart of Uptown was a sacrifice Thelma would have met with bitterness. Perhaps the pressures of home primed Toole for some time away from New Orleans. In Toole’s senior year the Lairds invited Toole on a family visit to an aunt and uncle that lived on a farm in Mississippi. Toole eagerly accepted. In 1954 he and the Lairds piled into their old Studebaker and headed due north to McComb, Mississippi. To the Lairds, there was little novelty in visiting the family farm, but to Toole everything teemed with the uniqueness of country life. The dairy farm and fields of crops offered new scenery. Toole rode on the back of a tractor and, as his best friend watched, eventually took his hand at driving one. It was no Oldsmobile. He struggled to shift the gears of the foreign contraption. Toole’s enthusiasm made him a welcomed visitor. Laird’s aunt Alice loved his company, which was in no small part due to his flattery of her. He commented that she had the look of the Italian actress Anna Magnani.

  The weekend visit soon came to an end, but Toole didn’t want to leave. He had seen another side of life, with different kinds of people. On the way back to New Orleans, he seemed invigorated by the whole experience. They passed road sign after road sign of religious platitudes, messages pleading for the moral sensibility of the passersby, signs that said “Drink and Drive and Burn Alive.” The overt dogma emblazoned on highway signs spoke to the tension between salvation and damnation, between religion and commercialism. Toole looked at Mississippi and its staunch religious conservatism as ripe, literary material. It was not a reflection of his own beliefs. While raised Catholic in a city with deep ties to Catholicism, the Tooles were not avid churchgoers. The parade of wealth made of the religious ceremony in Uptown churches drove Thelma and her son away from attending mass, so she claimed. Although, she maintained that her son was always “a Christian in the true sense of the word.” But what repulsed Thelma about the Catholic service intrigued Toole when he encountered it in another form in the Baptist church. The highway signs in Mississippi were religious messages blended with advertisements for products such as Burma-Shave shaving cream. And thus pleas to the faithful were simultaneous pleas to the consumer.

  The young observer had seen a different worldview, not necessarily one to which he aspired, but one with significance nonetheless. One of his favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, had grappled with conflicting messages of religion, but she had not placed it in the scope of a boy coming of age amid familial and social conflict. Somewhere between McComb and New Orleans, driving on a country road at night, T
oole asked his friend to pull over. Laird, somewhat confused as to Toole’s intent, did as requested. The New Orleanian who had spent most of his life seeing nights illuminated with street lamps that glowed in the river mist stepped out of the old Studebaker and looked up. He “gasped at the beauty of the millions of stars in the sky” and exclaimed, “‘I didn’t know there were this many stars in the heavens!’” It seemed a revelation had hit him. They all paused to appreciate the twinkling lights. Back in the car, heading south toward New Orleans, Toole told his friend, “I have to write a book.” He started muttering to himself, making mental notes of what he intended to do. Laird encouraged his enthusiasm, although he did not realize the seriousness with which Toole would pursue his idea.

  Back at home, Toole set to work on writing the book, distilling his impressions of Mississippi. The trip to the country sparked his interests in this world of God and land and the small Southern town. And for all the dozens of road signs blazing in his memory from the trip home, New Orleans provided him the central image to his novel, as well as the title. Along Airline Highway in Metairie, in the outskirts of New Orleans, a sign for Mid-City Baptist Church lit up at night. It was a radiant bible with red letters and yellow pages, opened to the passage of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The holy text beamed in commercial illumination like a commodity sold to customers. It embodied that tension between religion and commercialism. He had found the ironic symbol to place at the center of his book: The Neon Bible.

  In this short novel, Toole drew upon tensions between religious virtue and the sins of the faithful in a small Mississippi town during World War II. Under the veneer of a simple country life, a boy named David is driven to the edge and, in the end, kills a preacher to protect the body of his dead mother. At the heart of the novel is a tent revival that compels the townspeople to “find Jesus.”

  While Toole never attended a revival meeting in Mississippi, at the invitation of his friend Cary Laird, Toole went with his mother to “hear Billy Graham at a revival meeting at the old first Baptist church on St. Charles near the old Touro Infirmary.” He and his mother watched the impassioned evangelical preacher hold sway over the congregation. His mother recalled,We were fascinated—professing for Christ—young minister, very handsome, in a beige suit and a salmon tie showed how wicked social dancing was. I said to my son, “This is a fine religious meeting.” And they laughed their heads off. I didn’t think they were funny. My son gained a great deal from that.

  Toole must have appreciated the theatrical quality of the tent revival. And while Billy Graham may disagree that his revivals were “shows,” his organization used the same tactics that stage productions use to generate interest. Before coming to a city, a media blitz preceded him with posters and advertisements. Then for a series of nights, sometimes weeks on end, he preached the gospel. In Los Angeles in 1949, Graham spoke behind a huge stage prop bible opened toward the audience. And several years after his New Orleans “crusade” he would take Manhattan by storm, drawing in thousands upon thousands of audience members, filling Yankee stadium and Madison Square Garden. His preaching always culminated in the “altar call,” which was when members of the congregation would step forward to declare their promise to Jesus. Toole stood on stage as a young boy, but he had never held such power over an audience. And while his Catholic church had the regal and austere theater of ceremony, it was nowhere near as lively as the jam-packed seats of believers calling to Christ and professing aloud their faith. But mixed with his appreciation, he showed some disdain for the simplicity of the believers to be swayed by such theatrics, and so, as Thelma says, “they laughed their heads off.”

  As Toole drafted The Neon Bible, he must have recalled Billy Graham. The evangelist in the book who comes to the small Mississippi town appears remarkably similar to how Graham looked in 1954. David, the narrator protagonist, explains his first impressions of the evangelist:The first thing I noticed about him, even before his clothes and how skinny he was, were his eyes. They were blue, but a kind of blue I never saw before. It was a clear kind of eye that always looked like it was staring into a bright light without having to squint. His cheeks weren’t full like a boy’s would be, but hung in toward his teeth. You could hardly see his upper lip, not because it was thin, but because he had a long, narrow nose that sort of hung down at the end. He was blond-headed, with his hair combed straight back and hanging on his neck.

  And in the tent the spirits of the townspeople awaken. Even David nearly goes to the altar to profess his faith. The tent bonds the town together. But once it is taken down and the evangelist leaves town, everything begins to crumble. Having lost his father to the war, his Aunt Mae to the wind, and his mother, who died in his arms one night as he wiped the blood from her mouth, David, in the end, defends the family home when the preacher from the local church comes to take his mother to the mental hospital. Unaware of her death, the preacher’s presence threatens to uncover their poor and secretive existence. So as the preacher ascends the stairs, David shoots him in the back and kills him, then flees town. Like Flannery O’Connor, Toole uses violence to twist the plot, moving it from the subdued, coming-of-age story of a Mississippi teenager to the tale of a boy pushed to the brink to defend his mother, resulting in his being ousted from the community he had known all his life.

  While The Neon Bible has become known as a work of juvenilia, an accomplishment in respect to Toole’s age at the time he wrote it, the novel remains a work that demonstrates his keen awareness of character and dialogue. Kerry Luft, senior editor at the Chicago Tribune, expresses this early talent: “Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” He likely gleaned this style of simplicity from one of his favorite novels at the time, The Catcher in the Rye. But his first novel also appears as a counter principle to Toole’s introduction to verbal expression under the guidance of his mother. Thelma expressed herself in the most florid ways possible. She prided herself on the occasional, elaborate “literary sentence” that she would contribute to her son’s school papers.

  But Toole decided the voice of the narrator in his novel needed to sound like an average teenager of the time. When David explains the experience of being beat up by high school bullies, he does so using the straightforward vocabulary of a sixteen-year-old:The first sock came. It was on my head right above my eye, and I began to cry again, only this time harder. They were all on me at once, I thought. I felt myself falling backward, and I landed with them on top of me. My stomach made a sick grinding noise, and I started feeling the vomit climb up into my throat. I was tasting blood on my lips now, and an awful scaredness was creeping from my feet up my legs. I felt the tingling go up till it grabbed me where I really felt it. Then the vomit came, over everything. Me, Bruce, and the other two. They screamed and jumped off me. And I laid there and the sun was hot and there was dust all over me.

  Toole clearly had the ability to describe this moment with more ornamentation, as is evident in his school papers, but he stays true to the diction of his character, describing the all-too-common experience of a boy terrorized by bullies.

  For some reason, Toole never told his mother he was writing a novel. And she had no idea that he submitted it to a writing contest. She explained years later, “He didn’t want me to worry, you see.” She never explained what worries she would have had. The very fact that he had written a novel deserved some celebration, but he kept the whole thing a secret. It was his first serious attempt to write fiction, and from his return from Mississippi to completing the novel in New Orleans, he took measures to ensure his mother remained completely unaware of it. The novel is an expression all his own, a definitive departure from his performances as a speaker, actor, or singer, and drafted in an energetic burst of writing. He had successfully expressed himself as a perceptive observer and a writer. But perhaps he never told his mother about The Neon Bi
ble for fear of what could happen and what did happen. When he received word he lost the contest, he tucked away the manuscript, hiding his failure, suffering the pangs of rejection alone.

  Despite his perceived failure as a novelist, his senior year was a busy time, overall, as he garnered recognition and accomplishment. He was elected a state representative at Boys’ State in August of 1953. He became managing editor of the school newspaper and assistant editor to the yearbook. In October of 1953 he appeared as a guest speaker at the Kiwanis Club. He was inducted into the honor society. He took fifth place in a Spanish language contest. And on December 16, the day before his sixteenth birthday, he appeared on local television with six other students to review the epic novel Tree of Liberty. A month later, Silver and Blue published a “Senior Spotlight” on him, naming him “one of Fortier’s big wheels.”