Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

  His mind must have reeled during the long trip north. He had restrained himself in his replies, trying to maintain his composure. What would he say when he stood in front of the man who had called his work “meaningless”? But when he arrived at Simon and Schuster, he found Gottlieb was once again out of town. For the second time, he stood in the office of his would-be publisher after a full day’s travel, only to find Gottlieb away. As he spoke to Miss Jollett, a tide of emotion overwhelmed him. As he later explained, he was “bent with obsequiousness” as he “almost sank through the floor in between . . . silences, cryptic comments and occasional mindless (for it had left me) absurdities.” Then he blacked out. Moments later, returning to consciousness, he left a request for Gottlieb to call him, and he returned to New Orleans. He had suffered a nervous breakdown in the offices of Simon and Schuster.

  Toole knew he had embarrassed himself. To Gottlieb in 1965, Toole was one of the hundreds of talented young writers with manuscripts that would pass by his desk in any given month. And the busy editor could carry on a conversation through letters without it intruding on his daily work. But now Toole had come to his place of business unannounced and created a disturbing scene. As a potential partner in an artistic endeavor, Toole had presented troubling, unstable behavior. The whole fiasco even took Toole by surprise. What had caused him to act so irrationally? What compelled him to lash out at the one person he had identified as his lifeline? It was the first incident indicating the paranoia and the despair that would consume him.

  After such an episode, many editors would have justifiably walked away, cutting off all communication. But in late February or early March Gottlieb called, and Toole asked him to clarify some of his statements made in the December letter. During that conversation, Gottlieb made the suggestion that it might be time for Toole to work on another novel, which Toole interpreted as “an opening to withdraw with at least a little grace.” By this point, Gottlieb knew he was dealing with an incredibly sensitive, possibly disturbed writer, and he opened all possibilities to Toole. Perhaps a rejection letter would have made a clean break between editor and writer. But something about Toole kept Gottlieb’s interests. Perhaps recognizing Gottlieb’s willingness to overlook the episode in New York, Toole let his guard down. He wrote Gottlieb a letter detailing the story of his life and the story behind Confederacy. It was rare for Toole to be so open and candid about his personal affairs. He confesses, “I’ve been trying to think straight since speaking to you on the telephone, but confusion and depression have immobilized my mind. I have to come out of this though, or I’ll never do anything.” He also recognized that his own relationship to his work was withholding him. The intensity that he felt toward his novel, which de Russy noted in 1963, had increased. He writes to Gottlieb, “Whenever I attempt to talk in connection with Confederacy of Dunces I become anxious and inarticulate. I feel very paternal about the book; the feeling is actually androgynous because I feel as if I gave birth to it too.”

  Toole goes on to explain his experiences in New York, Lafayette, and Puerto Rico, and then refocuses on the book:The book is not autobiography; neither is it altogether invention. While the plot is manipulation and juxtaposition of characters, with one or two exceptions the people and places in the book are drawn from observation and experience. I am not in the book; I’ve never pretended to be. But I am writing about things that I know, and in recounting these, it’s difficult not to feel them.

  And while he draws a distinction between himself and his creation, he writes later in the letter that in some ways Ignatius became part of him:No doubt this is why there’s so much of [Ignatius] and why his verbosity becomes tiring. It’s really not his verbosity but mine. And the book, begun one Sunday afternoon, became a way of life. With Ignatius as an agent, my New Orleans experiences began to fit in, one after the other, and then I was simply observing and not inventing . . .

  In a twist of roles, Toole, who had spent so much time observing people around him, had placed himself into his character he created to re-envision his world.

  He goes on to address Gottlieb’s critique of the novel. He fully acknowledges, “I know that it has flaws, yet I am afraid that some stranger will bring them to my attention.” He admitted that the Levys were “the book’s worst flaw” and Myrna Minkoff may be “a debacle.” But he holds fast to Irene Reilly, Santa Battaglia, Patrolman Mancuso, and Burma Jones because “these people say something about New Orleans. They’re as real as individuals and also as representative of a group.” Clarifying his point, he states,One night recently I watched again as Santa bumped around while Irene sat on a couch guffawing into a drink. And how many times have I seen Santa kissing her mother’s picture. Burma Jones is not a fantasy, and neither is Miss Trixie and her job, the Night of Joy Club, and so on.

  Gottlieb had suggested the novel had no point. Here Toole explains, at the very least, the novel makes a statement about New Orleans, because it offers the real New Orleans. Toole understood that Gottlieb meant it needed more universal significance. But his “doubts [turned] into despair” when one of Gottlieb’s comments struck hard. Echoing the editorial criticism that haunted him most, Toole writes, “The book seemed to become about nothing.” Toole’s frustration seems rooted in his confusion over how to change the novel. He confesses he felt “somewhat like a bouncing ball,” never finding a clear path to gain Gottlieb’s approval. Still, he determines to continue on with the revisions, accepting some of the editorial suggestions:This book is what I know, what I’ve seen and experienced. I can’t throw these people away. No one has ever done much insofar as writing about this milieu is concerned, I don’t think. Myrna and the Levys may only serve to hinder the book, especially in their being extraneous. If the Levys cause me such problems, they don’t belong.... What was very accurate in your commentary about the revision was your separating real and unreal characters.

  In other words, I’m going to work on the book again. I haven’t even been able to look at the manuscript since I got it back, but since something like 50 percent of my soul is in the thing, I can’t let it rot without trying. And I don’t think I could write anything else until this is given at least another chance.

  After this confession to a person he had spoken with on the phone a few times, but had never met, a version of Confederacy without the Levys or Myrna Minkoff and perhaps significantly less Ignatius was in the works.

  With a decade of editorial experience, Gottlieb understood the diverse nature of writers. They can be sensitive creatures, and the editor must tread softly at times. He usually appeared sympathetic to Toole’s frustrations, although he rarely sugarcoated his points. But there were moments when Gottlieb must have become fatigued with the indulgences writers afforded themselves as they operated in a creative pursuit initially outside the marketplace. One could imagine that, as Gottlieb responded to such writers, at times he must have grumbled to himself.

  In fact, George Deaux—who taught at University of Southwestern Louisiana, formerly Southwestern Louisiana Institute, the year after Toole left, and who also worked with Robert Gottlieb throughout the 1960s when Simon and Schuster published his three novels—recalls a moment when Gottlieb appeared exhausted with a writer, perhaps after reading a confession like the one that Toole sent him. In passing, Deaux mentioned to Gottlieb that he enjoyed Fellini’s 8 1/2 in part because he “identified with the Mastroianni character.” Gottlieb’s response was “uncharacteristically irritable, almost angry. . . . He denounced Fellini for his neurotic self-pity and went on to rail against artists generally for their self-indulgence.” Deaux initially thought that the criticism was aimed at him, but he realized Gottlieb was too polite and too direct “to make gratuitous comments about my personality . . . through the vehicle of an Italian movie. I concluded that he must have had a bad day with a self-indulgent author other than me.”

  Gottlieb took a few weeks to reply to Toole’s letter. He wrote a cordial response, thanking him for the personal history. It still rin
gs with slight derision as Gottlieb attempts to describe why Toole has been unable to produce satisfactory revisions:When someone like yourself is living off from the center of cultural-business activities, with only a thin lifeline to that center, through vague and solitary contacts, everything gets disproportionate, difficult to analyze, to give proper weight to.

  It is like those odd people who turn up in New Zealand or Tanganyika or Finland, writing or painting masterpieces. They have their own power, but they read or look as if the artist has had to discover the forms for himself. They don’t have the assurance of worldliness and mutual interest and energy with others. So I can see that to you I (or Jean) is not merely a person, but a voice with more authority than it could possibly deserve. Not that I’m not good at my job, because I am and no one is better; but that I’m just someone, and a good deal less talented than you.

  Much has been made of this passage as an indication of Gottlieb’s Manhattan condescension. And while there is some value in that interpretation, it also stands true that Gottlieb refers to himself when he writes “the thin lifeline.” Whatever he thought about an artist rooted to New Orleans, his main point is true to an editorial philosophy that he had long held and expressed forty years later in an interview with Charlie Rose when he states, “I think the cult of editing is far overblown.” Gottlieb seems to suggest that Toole might be trying too hard to please his editor, instead of receiving the comments and figuring out how to apply them to benefit the novel.

  In closing the letter, Gottlieb leaves the door wide open for Toole:You are a good writer and a serious person and are doing your job seriously and modestly and of course it isn’t easy. . . . A writer’s decisions are his own, not his editor’s. If you know you have to continue with Ignatius, that is of course what you should do. I will read, reread, edit, perhaps publish, generally cope, until you are fed up with me.

  Please write me short or long at any time, if only to say that you’re working (or not). Or if you like, show me bits of what you’ve done. Or don’t; whichever would be more useful. Cheer up. Work. We are overcoming.

  Toole found Gottlieb’s letter “calming.” And he wrote back to him with renewed vigor for the novel. He reasoned that the decade between writing The Neon Bible and starting Confederacy he had pent up “unused energies” that “came flooding into this book and created too great a concentration of emotion.” But now he recognized that editing a manuscript so bound up in passion sometimes requires some bloodletting:What is most apparent is the need for a red pencil through a lot of it. There are hints in the book of developing themes and ideas, but they seem to be abandoned before they become consistent statements. I see a possibility of having the book say something that will be real, that will develop out of the characters themselves and what I know of them, that will not simply be a superficial imposition of “purpose.” The book as it is evades certain logical consequences of the nature of the characters themselves, and in this way wastes a character or two. But I do have ideas for the book, and I am beginning to work on it. I hope that I’ll be able to send you a re-working of the thing in the not too distant future; since I am able to “see” and “hear” these characters, I can always work with them . . .

  I have rallied, have begun to work. And spring is here.

  As the academic year of 1965 came to a close, nearly completing his second year at Dominican, Toole reflected on his progress, although surely disappointed that his plan was not coming together as quickly as he originally thought it would. He writes a letter on May 4 to both Fletcher and Polites,Since both of you know my writing project, I must say that eight air mail letters and one hour-long distance call from Simon and Schuster later, I am still faced with revisions. Although I am “wildly funny often, funnier than almost anyone else around,” the book is too “intelligent to be only a farce.” It must have “purpose and meaning.” However, it is full of “wonderfulnesses” and “excitements” and “glories.” But they worked “more than three years on Catch-22.” If and when it does appear, it will be unbearably “significant,” I imagine. Also, I am like “one of those geniuses who turn up in Tanganyika or New Zealand.” Poor New Orleans. Suppose I had sent the thing in from Breaux Bridge . . . or Parks. Broken and leering toothlessly, I may yet be on some book jacket. Looking at this more constructively, I have been (and am) fortunate in having the book reach so quickly people who have given me a degree of confidence in what I’m trying to do; goodness knows they’ve extended much time and interest.

  Toole still maintained his sense of humor, and he certainly recognized his remarkable advances in his pursuit of publication. But getting a book published was clearly more difficult for him than being in graduate school or in the army. And for someone to whom success came relatively easy, this challenge took an emotional and psychological toll. It seems the revisions wore on his spirit to the point they began to change his outlook on life. Somehow, in his mind, what he calls his “pretentious rambling” connected to the Gulf Coast. He continues,All of which leads to something else, I guess. The Gulf Coast looks better when you’re not there. I was there recently; it looked much more appealing in undergraduate days.

  Even his notions of New York had shifted. He once dreamt of that city as an exciting cultural mecca. After all, it was at the center of “cultural-business” affairs as Gottlieb had written. But Toole writes,Although you may not agree, life here is certainly better than the masochism of living in New York, which has become the Inferno of America the American Dream as Apocalypse. And I’d never be able to try to write anything if I were caught up in the Columbia-Hunter axis.

  Fletcher always sensed that his friend would have liked to live the literary life in New York. Expressing such spite toward the city, and such disappointment in the surrounding region of New Orleans, suggests Toole’s possible routes of escape were becoming limited. The passages were narrowing, and he was losing grip on the thread that would lead him out. When his New York friend Clayelle Dalferes visited him in New Orleans, he told her he never had intentions to leave New Orleans again. “It was the only place he felt comfortable.” And yet, in that same conversation when she asked how his job at Dominican was going, he dryly replied, “Teaching smells.”

  As Toole began his third year at Dominican in 1965, Hurricane Betsy slammed into New Orleans. On the evening of September 9 the water and winds broke levees, floodwaters reached thirteen feet high in some neighborhoods like Chalmette and the Lower Ninth Ward, and many people drowned in their attics. President Lyndon Johnson flew in on a helicopter to offer his support. Uptown was spared the worst of the damage; however, much of New Orleans was under water. But as New Orleanians have always done since the founding of their city, they slowly rebuilt their neighborhoods out of the rubble.

  And as the city put itself back together, it seems Toole renewed his hope for publication. He sent a letter to Gottlieb in early January of 1966. The letter no longer exists, but from Gottlieb’s response, Toole wanted only to maintain connection with him. Nine months had passed since Toole’s last letter, but he still had no revised manuscript to submit. Gottlieb replied,Dear Mr. Toole,

  I was glad to hear from you, particularly since a week or two ago—when the year changed—I had wondered how you were coming along. My interest in the book remains what it was. I liked a lot of it a lot; thought it needed much work; and have a small doubt that something so long agonized over is ever going to live up to (at least) your own expectations. I certainly want to read it again, when you’re through doing what you’re doing.

  I don’t think your purpose in writing me was vague. Everyone needs to feel outside, professional interest in what he’s doing; we live on it. But you are not working in a void, even as far as New York publishing is concerned: at least this one editor is interested. And hoping that you’ve made the right choice in continuing with this book rather than starting something new. But that decision has been made; now to see what you do with it. Onwards. Best, Bob Gottlieb.

  It had been
more than two years since Gottlieb first read the manuscript, and he still remained open to it. Over the course of their correspondence, Toole received more compliments and criticism, more attention from a New York editor than many writers will ever receive. But Gottlieb never offered pure praise. He was known for being courteous and direct. And while Gottlieb has long been vilified as the one that ruined Toole, there was no way for him to understand the pressure building inside the Toole home. As evident in his replies, Toole was deeply impacted by Gottlieb’s criticisms. But it may have been difficult for Toole to keep a clear perspective on that criticism if boundaries between work and family, between his professional writing career and his relationship with his mother were not upheld. From what Polites witnessed on several occasions, Thelma ranted and raged but did not comfort her son with sympathy at a moment he may have needed it most.

  The publication ordeal had been a difficult saga. It was becoming clearer to Toole that his stay in New Orleans was not temporary. With many congratulations, he was promoted to assistant professor at Dominican. And with an increased salary, his family could afford to rent a nicer home. Toole found a duplex in Uptown on Hampson Street, a short distance to Dominican. A step up from their apartment on Audubon Street, it had a lovely garden. And at the end of the street, on the corner of Hampson and Pine, lived Dominican College art professor Angela Gregory.