But Patricia didn’t need anecdotes from Toole’s childhood to see that even as he cared deeply for his parents, they could distress him. One weekend his parents came to visit, seeing their son for the first time in the environment of his own home. Toole introduced them to the artist-tenant upstairs, Elmore Morgan, who remembered them in good spirits as they laughed and made jokes. But during their stay, Toole’s father noticed that his son’s apartment lacked sufficient protection from intruders. Over the weekend John installed deadbolt locks on the external and internal doors. In the event of a break-in, he explained, one would have a plan of retreat. This strategy may have made sense in their apartment in New Orleans with its rooms branching off a long hallway. But the extreme measures made little sense in a two-room apartment in a small rural community, where few people locked their doors at night. Patricia witnessed the new locks on the doors and the embarrassment behind her dear friend’s half-smile when explaining his father’s behavior.
An evening with the Rickelses meant some moments with a stable family that was genuinely content with spending time together. On the weekends, Toole often joined them on their days in the country, clearing the plot of land they had recently purchased to build their dream home. Because of his weak legs, Milton could not do strenuous labor, so Patricia, Gordon, and Toole hacked away at the thick overgrowth. After hours of work, they would have a picnic, eating together as they watched the Spanish moss sway in the trees and the slow steady stream of the Bayou Vermillion make its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. After lunch they returned to clearing the land. Occasionally, Toole showed his true colors as a city boy. One day as they cut through thick vines and tall weeds, Pat heard Toole shriek, “Snake!” She looked up to see him running away from the area he had been working. Expecting a venomous serpent to greet her, Patricia carefully approached the cleared section to find a common garden snake. She killed it, and they all had a good laugh at Toole. After all, they bordered the swamps of Louisiana that had been home to reptiles long before humans arrived. With Toole’s help, they cleared the land to build the house where, years later, he would come to visit, taking retreat from his life in New Orleans.
Toole survived days in the countryside with the Rickelses, but clearly he felt far more comfortable in the social setting of the dining room. Over modest meals of pasta and wine, the Rickelses relished his witty conversation, lively impersonations, and his stories. Sometimes he would tell them of his shameless pranks he played on the department chair Mary Dichmann. A tall and proud woman, Dichmann had been an officer in the Navy in World War II. As Patricia remembers, “You didn’t want to mess with her.” But Toole did. On occasion he would sneak into Dichmann’s classroom as soon as the doors in Little Abbeville were opened in the morning and write a message on the board, inoffensive, but sure to embarrass the proud professor. His favorite line was, “Mary Dichmann eats Fritos.” Minutes later, as the students entered and took their seats, they tried to make sense of the cryptic message on the board. When Dichmann arrived and read the message as the students laughed under their breath, she was outraged and embarrassed, but she had no way of knowing who did it. And with her blind devotion to any graduate of Tulane, she would never suspect Toole. Knowing this, he could carry on his pranks and confess to other faculty members, hopefully over dinner, that he was the culprit.
To his friends’ enjoyment, Toole also made up stories of two androgynous, globetrotting friends, Flip and Sandy, who were always visiting exotic locales like Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. He would begin each tale with the line, “I got a letter from Flip and Sandy today.” Then he explained the colorful adventures they described in the letter and what he had written back to them. Intrigued by his most interesting friends, Patricia would sometimes ask if they would ever have a chance to meet Flip and Sandy. “I’m afraid not,” Toole always replied. They finally figured out that Toole was making it all up, but they didn’t care. The stories and characters were so interesting they enjoyed losing themselves in the fiction.
From harmless pranks to imaginative storytelling, Toole seemed like an unending wealth of entertaining conversation. But his charm had its limits in the eyes of his colleagues. In addition to his frequent visits to the Rickelses, he visited the homes of other couples in the department. Nearly everyone played host to the young bachelor, and after a meal the wives would often sew buttons on his pants and coats for him. Everyone appreciated his company and conversation, but their sympathies started to wear thin, especially when they recognized his miserliness. “He was a cheapskate!” Patricia Rickels remembers, “He would sponge off of everybody, and everyone would invite him to dinner.” Toole offered good company, but he seemed content to dine at the expense of his friends. Of course, with all these invitations to dinner, and with the convivial sort in what he once called “the fattest English department in the lower Deep South,” Toole experienced a common side effect of moving to Cajun country. Having gone through school as a portly adolescent, he was horrified to discover he was gaining weight. The slim-fitting jacket with which he arrived in Lafayette began to bulge, and his white shirt started to show through the slit in the back. Perhaps that is why the buttons on his shirts and pants kept popping off.
As his body showed signs of his indulgences, the faculty had had enough of his willingness to consume and not contribute. They demanded Toole throw them a party. At first he resisted, saying, “I don’t know if I can.” Regardless of his hesitation, they informed him, “You have to!” With an apartment far too small to entertain the English department, he asked his landlord, Mrs. Montgomery, if he could have a party in her garden. After some persuasion, she agreed, and Toole welcomed his colleagues to a small affair with few refreshments. He seemed out of his element as a host. When one of the professors accidentally broke one of Mrs. Montgomery’s lawn chairs, Toole became nervous, exclaiming, “She’s gonna kill me!”
The party ended without another incident, except for Toole’s own flirtatious behavior. Emboldened by cocktails, he focused his attention on Patricia Rickels, as Milton ushered her into the car. Patricia vividly remembers the scene that ensued. Toole positioned himself in the car window, preventing their departure. “He didn’t want me to go,” Patricia recalls. “He was leaning over me inside the car and wouldn’t leave.” Milton liked Toole very much, but like many of the other husbands in the department, he found his company irritating at times. He had a way of stepping too close to the bond between husband and wife. Milton had enough of Toole’s flirtations. “Get out of the window, Ken. We want to leave!” he said. Toole replied, “Well, I’m not through saying goodbye.” “Yes you are!” Milton shot back as he rammed the window up, choking Toole at the neck. “I’m gonna strangle you to death if you don’t get out of the window,” he yelled. Toole nodded, removed his head from the window, and returned to his apartment. It was, by far, the boldest move he ever made on Patricia and fairly out of character for him. But on another occasion, when he forgot himself in the company of another bachelor, he expressed in crude terms his attraction and desire for Patricia.
Patricia took Toole’s affection as flattery, not temptation. She was devoted to her husband. But she also cared deeply for her friend. Looking back on her many years at SLI, she said, “There have been people I have known here for thirty, forty years, but they didn’t leave the impression that Ken left on me. It’s hard to believe he was here only for one year.” Her eyes glimmered as she remembered her friend who walked into her life in 1959. She even saw some part of herself in his novel. She was convinced Toole recalled her Civil Rights activities on campus when he wrote about the Crusade for Moorish Dignity in Confederacy . She, too, wanted some lasting connection between her and her friend.
In Patricia, Toole found a smart, warm, loving, and at times maternal woman. She never sought to manipulate or gain anything from him. She simply wanted his company. And Milton eventually overlooked the episode in the car window. After some time apart and a little distance, they, too, became close frien
ds again. The Rickelses offered Toole an enthralled audience and an example of what a family life could be, the kind for which he may have yearned.
His relationship with the Rickelses, his honorary Lafayette family, did not alleviate him from the devotion he felt to his own parents. Throughout his year in Lafayette, he often returned to New Orleans on weekends. Usually one of the other professors wanted to go, too, so a few people would split the cost of gas and share company during the drive. Nick Polites often traveled with Toole. Initially they would go their separate ways, spend time with their families, and return to Lafayette together for Monday classes. But as they grew closer as friends, Polites invited Toole to meet his mother. In turn, Toole invited Polites to meet his family. On that day Polites entered their small apartment on Audubon Street, “furnished in the inexpensive, period-style furniture at the time.” He saw in passing Toole’s father, who “just glided through and went into one of the back rooms.” Mrs. Toole came to the living room and, at her son’s request, sat down at “the tiniest baby grand piano” Polites had ever seen. For months Toole had bragged about his mother’s musical talents. “My mother could have been a concert pianist,” Toole once said to Polites. But what Polites heard bewildered him:She played the first movement of a Haydn sonata. The instrument was out of tune, she had the score on the piano’s music rack, and her playing didn’t make musical sense at all. She’d stop when she had to turn a page, and slow down when she couldn’t play the eighth or sixteenth notes at tempo.
Perhaps she was losing her touch with the ivory keys, although, her students would not speak so critically. But her playing is not what surprised Polites most of all; it was his friend’s ability to overlook it. “When Ken could be dismissive about so many things, it was interesting to see the mother/son relationship expressed so totally uncritically and unrealistically.” Perhaps this unwavering devotion to each other’s talents was how Thelma and her son expressed their unconditional love.
Over the course of a few months, spending time in Lafayette and traveling back and forth to New Orleans, Toole and Polites eventually breached a conversation on sexuality. Toole was aware of Polites’s “gay side,” so it came as no surprise when he invited Toole to a gay party in the French Quarter. And Toole expressed interest in going. “There were a lot of silly people there,” Polites admits. But there were also “a few thoughtful people that he might have had a really good conversation with.” However, upon entering the apartment Toole became visibly uncomfortable. The personality that blossomed at social events in Lafayette now shriveled into a corner. Even after Polites introduced him to a few acquaintances, Toole sat without saying a word. He “talked to no one, and no one talked to him.” Soon after they arrived, Toole mentioned to Polites his intentions to leave. Recognizing his discomfort, Polites agreed to leave the party as well. Later that evening, Toole “expressed his negative feelings about the gay world, or gay life.” Polites detected that his friend saw it all in stereotypes; he determined Toole “was intimidated” by what he saw at the party. But Polites is also quick to mention that, while they spent a lot of time together, they were not close confidants. Much of what Polites concluded from that conversation, he warns, is conjecture.
It is interesting that as a teenager Toole boundlessly explored his city, and he now found a place that discomfited him. It is tempting to deduce some conclusion about Toole’s intent in going to the party, but that presumes more than even Polites would surmise from that night. “Toole kept his own counsel,” as Bobby Byrne once observed. Whether disgusted, intimidated, enticed, or shocked by what he saw, no one knows for sure, and it matters little. He likely used his impressions of the party to create the scene of the gay soirée in Confederacy, where Ignatius tries to organize the Army of Sodomites. Whatever Toole’s reasons for going to the party, his curiosity, from wherever it stemmed, spurred him to see all sides of New Orleans life, even if that led to some discomfort.
Joel Fletcher, another friend from SLI, also witnessed this innate curiosity in Toole. Near the end of the academic year, Fletcher, who was working in the basement office of the news bureau at the college and was also the son of the president of SLI, met the young scholar from New Orleans. Polites had suggested that the two meet, but they didn’t get around to it until the beginning of the summer, months after Polites left for the army in January. As predicted, Fletcher and Toole sparked an immediate friendship. They were both Tulane graduates, cultured intellectuals, and held much higher ambitions than Lafayette, Louisiana. Throughout the remaining weeks of the school year, they drove to bars and talked about literature, music, and art. And every so often they traveled to New Orleans.
In July of 1960 they took a trip to the Crescent City where Fletcher saw Toole observe a unique New Orleans scene. The day after they arrived, they met up at the Napoleon House to eat lunch. They spent the rest of the afternoon meandering through the Quarter. They browsed bookstores and had a memorable encounter with the sizeable posterior of New Orleans writer Frances Parkinson Keyes. And they walked to Elysian Fields, the childhood neighborhood of Toole’s parents, where his aunt and uncle still lived. They strolled through the once respectable section of town, which had since become depressed. They walked by people standing in doorways and “dirty-looking mothers screaming at their much dirtier children.” As it started pouring rain, Toole became “transfixed by the scene” of a mother who violently struck her child in an attempt to protect him from the downpour. Fletcher recounts in his memoir,“GET IN OUTTA DAT RAIN, CHA’LIE” one of the mothers yelled at her child, and (WHAP!) struck the child with a convenient board. “GET IN OUTTA DAT RAIN! YOU’LL GET SICK!” (WHAP!). She struck again.
Later that day as they drank coffee, Toole “mimicked the Elysian Fields mother braining her child while voicing such concern over his welfare, chuckling to himself, delighted by the comic irony.” Fletcher had witnessed Toole’s process of observation. Heeding a moment unfolding before him, Toole watched and then shortly thereafter rehearsed the narrative and the voices, working his way to the spirit of the moment, not to merely report or accurately represent it, but to boil it down to its most humorous essence. And then he likely cataloged it somewhere in his mind, ready to recall on another occasion, at a party, talking with friends, or when he finally sat down to write his novel.
Such a mentality requires a degree of detachment. Instead of expressing sympathy for the child or judgment of the mother, Toole recognized it as one of the many tragi-comic vignettes that abound in New Orleans on any given day. Elmore Morgan, the artist who lived in the apartment above Toole, concisely described this character trait in Toole when he said in an interview: “He had a sort of detached view, in a sense; he was an observer. Rather than get terribly upset by some situation, he would be more likely to deal with it in a sort of humorous way, to see the absurdity and irony and humor in it.... Humor was a way of dealing with things that he couldn’t do anything about.”
Toole’s reactions suggest his recognition of forces in this world he could not change, and laughter was the way to overcome them. In comparing the two moments of New Orleans life, Toole was far more comfortable watching a scene in the street than sitting in that party with Polites, but in both cases, this was his city to absorb and reflect, in all its unsettling humor. And regardless of the situation, from watching a scene of domestic violence unfold on Elysian Fields to awkward moments at a party in the French Quarter, during this period Toole is said to have had a constant “half-smile on his face, as though he were up to something, as though he were amused by the people in the world around him.”
Toole and Fletcher returned to Lafayette to finish out the remaining days of the semester. At SLI Toole found companions with whom he could discuss art and literature. He relished the eccentricities of his colleagues. And he had the joy of partaking in life with the Rickels family. As Patricia recalls, Toole was “in his season of glory” in Lafayette. He was coming closer to his own spark of innovation, collecting the voices that would e
cho through his own work. Joking with Patricia, he once commented that “he couldn’t stay at SLI more than a year because he didn’t want to get any fatter.” But truthfully, he must have felt that nagging compulsion toward achieving something great, whether in writing or in teaching. And it was not going to happen in Cajun country, or at any college at this point. As Toole well understood, a master of arts, even from Columbia, walks in limbo. He could teach classes, but rarely would an MA gain promotion or achieve tenure. So he set his sights on returning to graduate school to get his PhD.
In May of 1960 the SLI English department newsletter announced that Toole was “resigning his position . . . at the end of the summer semester to return to Graduate Studies.” He would attend the University of Washington on a three-year university fellowship and “do his specialized study in the field of Renaissance English Literature.” Washington was an odd choice for him, but for a penny-pinching scholar such an offer would be difficult to refuse. According to Patricia Rickels, “He wanted to be in New York more than anything.” He also wanted the prestige of Columbia. The logistics of finances created a substantial barrier between him and New York. Fortunately, in June, word came from his mentor, John Wieler, who was able to make good on the promise stated in his recommendation letter to SLI a year earlier. The English department newsletter announced that Toole would “return to graduate school at Columbia University this September . . . [after receiving] an appointment to the faculty of Hunter College, and he will teach at Hunter while attending Columbia.” Even with a job in New York, between tuition, living expenses, and a schedule stretched between teaching and taking courses, the stage was set for a life of intense financial pressure. But after a year in the bayou, New York may have once again appeared a luminous city in the distance, a metropolis of aspirations ascending into the sky.
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