Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

  Toole and Gregory became good friends, enjoying morning and afternoon walks to and from campus together. Gregory had lived in Paris where she studied sculpture under Antoine Bourdelle and befriended mythologist Joseph Campbell. Her artwork adorns buildings and public spaces throughout Louisiana. Her statue of Jean Baptiste de Bienville, the founder of New Orleans, stands proudly in the French Quarter. Nearing her mid-sixties, she had already led an exciting and successful career as a sculptor. And so the two artists, one famously trained by a master and recognized in her own day and the other a bright scholar and writer who suffered the woes of dejection all too common in the arts, must have had riveting conversations strolling under the live oaks of Uptown. In the afternoon they would stand at the corner of Hampson and Pine, talking for what seemed to be hours. They may have discussed her recent projects working toward a Louisiana statue at Gettysburg, or perhaps his attempts at publication. Or it might have become more personal, perhaps about his struggles at home. Whatever they discussed, Toole had found a friend with whom he could share the final moments of the day before returning to his parents for the evening.

  But for all the niceties the move to Hampson Street provided, Toole had driven deeper into the labyrinth. Seemingly at a loss as to how to edit his novel without destroying it, unable to spill the blood of his creation, his master plan now lay unraveled in his hands. Just as he did with The Neon Bible, he put away his manuscript in a box. He cut the string and gave himself over to the trappings of his own condition.

  Chapter 11

  Decline and Fall

  Much of Toole’s life had been a continual progression toward achieving some stature of greatness, either in academics or fiction writing. And many of his accomplishments had come easy to him. But the novel had posed the most formidable challenge; it also held the greatest potential to elevate him and his parents out of their financial state. The fact that he could not revise it to the satisfaction of a New York editor must have been a devastating blow to his pride. What would his life become now that the path leading out of the drudgery of working to merely sustain his family seemed inaccessible? Many of his friends had left New Orleans: Emilie Dietrich had married William Griffin in 1963 and was living and writing in New York City. Nick Polites was writing and publishing articles on design and architecture while working at a prestigious design firm in Manhattan. Cary Laird was living in Miami and working for an insurance company. Joel Fletcher was living in Paris. And each day Toole walked to the small Catholic college a few blocks away to teach, and then walked home at night, living with his parents in the same neighborhood that he had known all his life. But there was something at play more sinister than personal failures or a sense of confining filial duty. Toole’s brilliant mind was falling under the grasp of mental illness.

  His family history had more than its fair share of mental health issues. His father slowly deteriorated into senility. Thelma’s uncle, James Ducoing, committed suicide a few months before Toole was born. In December of 1941, several years after Thelma’s sister died of an illness, her surviving husband threw himself off a high-rise building on Canal Street. And in 1966 one of Thelma’s brothers, George Ducoing, exhibited a full-blown mental illness that was getting out of control. Excluding Thelma, the Ducoing siblings lived in a small home on Elysian Fields, two doors down from the home where they had grown up. In a letter to the coroner dated February 28, 1966, Arthur Ducoing sought to have his brother committed:My brother’s nervousness is apparent by his incessant loud talking at home. A source of great annoyance to three other people in the house, ranging in age from sixty-six to eighty. Placing him in the House of Detention—his last stay of three weeks—doesn’t seem to accomplish much good.

  His need for institutional treatment is most urgent at this time. I would certainly like to see him placed in the Psychiatric Department at Charity Hospital, and would appreciate your helping the family as we really need it.

  The elderly siblings had requested the white Cadillac ambulance to come for their brother, just as it had for Ignatius Reilly. And now the seeds of psychosis germinated in the mind of Thelma’s genius son.

  It is difficult to determine when Toole started suffering from his illness. It appears the letters from Gottlieb, especially in their encouraging moments, sustained him in some ways. But Toole had embarrassed himself in New York with an uncharacteristic outburst, perhaps the first sign of his decline. One year later, Gottlieb still encouraged Toole to keep working at his revisions. But Toole tried to justify his decision to stop working on the novel when he told his army friend David Kubach that “if his book were published it was such a scathing satire of New Orleans that he wouldn’t be able to live there, but he couldn’t live anywhere else.” Kubach had read enough of the manuscript “to know it was fairly tame as far as satires go.” Toole’s conviction seemed to offer him some comfort, so Kubach did not challenge his friend’s reasoning. But packing up his novel must have put his life in terrifying perspective. As Kubach observed, “I think he thought his life was going to get long.”

  In 1963 Toole had arrived in New Orleans, sensing his own assent; now he found himself at the bottom of Fortuna’s wheel. And, at the bottom, the world looks different, as if the top seems unreachable. Toole succumbed to an inner force as he gradually lost grasp on reality. At first there came isolated incidents of strange behavior that his friends dismissed as anomalies. In retrospect, these episodes offer glimpses into the complex distortions of a brilliant mind suffering from paranoia; some people have conjectured paranoid schizophrenia. Whatever his diagnosis would have been, these episodes now appear as signposts pointing to a tragic end.

  In 1966 Toole was still teaching at Dominican with no pervasive signs of illness. His students still enjoyed his lectures. However, Pam Guerin recalls that during this period he spoke frequently about “the Mother,” not his mother, specifically, but rather a caricature of a mother dragging her child to dance lessons and other performances, instilling in her offspring all the crucial social graces to be expected but also living vicariously through her child. Many of his students, having experienced the upbringing of a “proper lady,” could relate to such a figure. But his insightful description of this mother and child dynamic suggested “he was part of it.” Guerin and other students could tell that he had intimate knowledge of the very character he mocked.

  As he explored this notion of the mother figure, he began having long conversations outside of class with his department chair, Sister Beatrice. She was described as “a master listener” because people often started conversations with her about literature and minutes later found themselves pouring out their souls. Sister Beatrice became one of Toole’s closest confidants. And as their friendship matured, as he opened up to her, she recognized his suffering. On at least one occasion, she visited the Toole home for dinner, a visit that would take special approval for a nun at the time. While Toole often seemed indifferent about his faith, it is ironic that in his descent into illness one of his closest confidants was a nun. Despite many attempts by journalists and writers to interview her, she took his confidences to her grave in 2004.

  Kubach, who had lent Toole his typewriter in Puerto Rico, also witnessed moments in his tragic decline. In the summer of 1967 Toole visited Kubach in Madison, Wisconsin. It had been years since they had seen each other in Puerto Rico, and Kubach was eager to show Toole his city. But he was not prepared for some of Toole’s odd behaviors. One day, as the two were walking in downtown Madison, Kubach spotted a friend approaching. Toole suddenly dove into a store, leaving Kubach awkwardly alone as he greeted his friend who had seen him walking with a companion. As Kubach recalls, “John was in fairly good spirits, so the action caught my attention.” He was puzzled as to why his affable friend had behaved so strangely to avoid meeting a new acquaintance.

  During that trip, Toole sent two postcards on July 20. He wrote to his parents, “The weather is clear, pleasant; the air is very fresh and clean. I’m having a very interesting
time and will see you sometime next week.” His language seems forced and trite. He also sent a postcard to his friend Angela Gregory with a simple message on the back: “Wish you were here.” While a cliché script for a postcard, he may have desired her company. He had spent many hours with Gregory, as they slowly walked home after classes, pausing at the corner of Hampson and Pine, continuing on with their conversation. Perhaps if she had been there in Wisconsin, he could tell her his thoughts, why he had suddenly fled to avoid meeting someone new.

  The trip ended without further incident. Months later, Kubach visited Toole in New Orleans. Taking an overnight train from Madison, Wisconsin, he fell asleep in the northern reaches of the United States and awoke to “beautiful pastoral images of Northern Louisiana.” Toole met him at the train depot, and within a few turns they were in downtown New Orleans. As Kubach recalls, “He showed me right away the place that he would eventually be buried, those above ground mausoleums.” Often called “cities of dead,” the above-ground graves necessitated by the frequent floods are a popular tourist attraction in New Orleans. But it was certainly a morbid way to start his tour.

  They continued on to the French Quarter where Toole “had a number of quips to say” about the “exotic looking people walking around.” Passing old colonial structures, such as the Old Absinthe House and Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, Toole bragged to Kubach that the famed pirate Lafitte, who had inspired Lord Byron’s poem “The Corsair,” was his ancestor. But then, as they drove through the historic city center, the paranoia that Kubach had seen in Wisconsin appeared once again. Toole became increasingly nervous. Looking in his rearview mirror, he explained to Kubach that his students from Dominican were following him, again. Determined to lose them, he started taking “evasive maneuvers” through the tight, cramped streets. Kubach saw no suspicious cars filled with deranged Catholic schoolgirls behind him. But since Toole was his guide, Kubach respectfully kept quiet. Eventually they slowed down, turned toward Uptown, and headed back home to Hampson Street. Kubach presumed they had successfully eluded the stalker students.

  While Toole played tour guide for part of the trip, he appeared generally uninterested in showing off his unique city. After the long journey south, Kubach wanted to experience New Orleans. But Toole just wanted to talk. “John never wanted to be out,” Kubach remembers. “His favorite scenario with me was drinks and talk. And he did most of the talking. I sometimes feel like I disappeared entirely in our friendship. I was just an audience really.” Eager to connect with his friend, perhaps Toole wanted to recapture some of the spirit of his army days. Kubach even suspected that Toole warned his mother not to interfere with their conversations. Thelma seemed to go out of her way to keep her distance. And somehow Kubach never met Toole’s father during their many hours spent in the small home. As the main breadwinner of the family, Toole had grounds to request his parents stay out of the way. He would need to make the inside of the home comfortable for him and his friend, especially if the outside world stoked his anxieties.

  Eventually, Toole and Kubach left the house to see the environs of New Orleans. They crossed Lake Pontchartrain, traveling the long twenty-three-mile bridge to Mandeville, and then returned. They headed west to Lafayette, although they did not stop to see the Rickelses or other friends. They also drove east to Biloxi, Mississippi. And after seeing the waterfront town, they headed back to New Orleans. But there was one more place Toole wanted to show Kubach. As they drove along the Gulf, Toole suddenly turned off the road. He drove north for a short distance and then pulled over onto the shoulder. They looked out to a nondescript field with a few pine trees. Toole seemed to think that this was a beautiful, peaceful place, a special spot that he wanted to share with his friend. But Kubach, accustomed to the majestic vistas of the upper-Midwestern states, found it unimpressive. “I suppose I wouldn’t have brought someone to that place,” Kubach comments, “unless something had happened there, or in this case something was about to happen.” Slightly puzzled by the trip, Kubach said goodbye to Toole and returned to Wisconsin.

  Granted, it would be unfair to cast Toole as a perpetually brooding, melancholy soul. Despite the episodes of odd behavior, he still had moments where his personality shined. Charlotte Powell enjoyed his company at several of her parties in 1967. Her apartment on Decatur Street in the French Quarter was a popular gathering place, in part because she had the luxury of a spacious kitchen. They would boil shrimp and crawfish, spread the feast on newspaper-covered tables, and a full array of French Quarter characters from hippies to professors would dig in. While some guests railed against the Vietnam War, Toole preferred more convivial conversation, playing off puns, discussing the current state of literature, bemoaning the popularity of Valley of the Dolls, and of course talking about New Orleans. Powell marveled at how Toole “brought the city to life” whenever he talked about it. She told him about a time she asked a lady for directions and couldn’t understand a word the lady said. She struggled to mimic the lady’s accent. Without skipping a beat, Toole went into an interpretation of a New Orleans woman giving directions. To Powell’s amazement, he sounded exactly like her. His humor, his intellect, and his quick wit, Powell recalls, made him “a most amazing person.” And despite some of the stories about Toole’s mental illness, Powell has no recollection of him appearing uneasy or behaving strangely. In fact, she marveled at how he “would walk into a room not knowing a single person and within twenty seconds be at ease, comfortable, and chatting with someone.”

  Toole also appeared cheerful during the Christmas of 1967, according to Thelma. Enjoying the extra income from his promotion at Dominican, they purchased a large Christmas tree and took out those fine European ornaments that they had bought just after Toole was born. They reminisced about their early days as a family. Thelma Toole would remember that holiday season as their finest Christmas in their new home.

  Unfortunately, the yuletide cheer could not dispel the clouds that gathered over the charming house on Hampson Street. Polites had been to the Toole home many times since his friend had returned from Puerto Rico, and he witnessed the storm building. Usually, Polites visited several times with Toole when he was in town, but the last time he saw him in 1968 the weight of depression pervading the house nearly chased him away. Polites recalls,After a dreary session I took my departure saying something like, “I’ll call and hope to see you once more before I leave.” But being with the Tooles had been such a downer that I couldn’t bring myself to call again, except when leaving from the airport. I said to Ken that I was sorry not to have seen him again before leaving, but that I became tied up and was busy for the rest of my visit and hadn’t had a chance to call. I felt guilty saying it. It wasn’t true. Maybe Ken recognized it. Certainly, his response literally shocked me. “That’s okay,” he said, “we saw each other just the right amount of time.” There was bitterness in his voice.

  Shortly after Polites’s return to New York, Fletcher called to ask about their friend whom he had not heard from for some time. Polites recounts,I told him about Ken and his parting line and said, “Ken’s not with us anymore.” I sensed Ken’s deep depression but I’m not certain whether I really articulated it to myself. I had no conscious notion of what I was saying to Joel. I never saw Ken again. I wish I’d known of the danger to come, though I doubt I could have done much.

  As Toole descended into depths his friends could not follow, everything seemed to be changing around him. The student body at Dominican, which had been previously required to wear high heels to dinners and prohibited from wearing pants to class during Toole’s first years at the school, was coming under the influence of the hippie generation. One of the three Trader sisters, Elise Trader Diament, sensed that Toole was baffled by these students who sat in class in raincoats and hair rollers and just stared at him, not engaging in discussion. He talked to them about authors one would expect the youth of the late 1960s to embrace—the predecessors of the hippie movement, the Beats. Elise recalled how he
admired the Beat Generation and how he “thought Jack Kerouac was wonderful.” Yet the students in hair rollers remained unresponsive. And perhaps this silence represented the chasm that was growing between the way he saw the world and the way the world seemed to be headed. It was painfully clear that Dominican could never serve as the peak of his literary life. As Elise explained, he was “a very deep person—too deep for Dominican.”

  By the fall of 1968, the students at Dominican started to notice that Professor Toole was not acting like his usual self. He was humorless, serious, and bitter—some students described him as “caustic.” He made snide remarks to girls who had received flowers during the holiday season. “How ridiculous,” he muttered. Chatter started to circulate about Professor Toole’s odd behavior. As Elise admits, “He had a few dark days.”

  Eventually his visions of Dominican students chasing him through the Quarter landed on his doorstep. One weekend over coffee, Toole told Bobby Byrne that students were driving by his house at night and honking the horn to taunt him. Even though Byrne had predicted the Dominicans would surely ruin him, he recognized that Toole was not well. While the threat of students may have been hallucinated, according to one Dominican student, some girls did honk their horns as they drove by his house at night. It was likely youthful teasing and some degree of flirtation. Clearly Toole’s state of mind misinterpreted their behavior as hostile. But these occurrences were irritants atop the far more disturbing confession he made to Byrne. He confessed he believed that the government had implanted a device into his brain. “Do you think I am imagining these things?” he asked his friend. Byrne recognized the telltale signs of paranoid schizophrenia. He replied, “Yes,” and advised him to get help. Unbeknownst to Byrne, Toole had gone to his family practitioner about debilitating headaches he was suffering. Of course any physician requires openness from a patient in order to achieve an accurate diagnosis. And while the conversations between doctor and patient remain confidential, his friends acknowledge Toole, even in his darkest moments, held a fierce dedication to his own perception. “He was so convinced of his own mind,” Kubach recalls, “you couldn’t change it.” In a rare moment he had opened up to Byrne, acknowledging the possibility that his perception might be distorted. But he had refined his mind over the years to be acute, sharp, quick, and accurate. He trusted it. Barring rarely seen moments of self-doubt, it appeared he would have faith in his own delusions. Then, as they sipped coffee, it seemed as if Toole flipped a switch somewhere in his mind; he returned to his usual self, making small talk about mutual friends in Lafayette and New Orleans.