Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

Poe was an artist who explored the darkest aspects of the human mind. And Toole could find many relatable traits to the Gothic poet. Poe had an actress mother. He had lived a life of financial struggle. As a Southern writer, he had faced a literary field dominated by figures in New England. His most famous poem “The Raven” was essentially stolen from him, widely published without his permission or benefit. And it has been theorized that Poe also grappled with mental illness. Of course there were few options for treatment, let alone diagnosis in his day. In the end, Poe ended up unconscious in a ditch. A few days later, estranged and muttering nonsense in a hospital in Baltimore, he died.

  Over a hundred years of medical advances separated Poe’s death from Toole’s descent into mental illness. And yet the therapy for severe mental disorders was a grim prospect in Toole’s day. Plenty of writers in the mid-twentieth century illustrate this point. When Ernest Hemingway fell into debilitating depression and displayed suicidal tendencies, doctors administered electroshock therapy, sending a current of electricity coursing through his body. In July of 1961 Hemingway decided only the blast from his shotgun could cease his suffering. And when Allen Ginsberg “saw the best minds of [his] generation destroyed by madness,” he had in mind his friend Carl Solomon in Rockland Psychiatric Center, who was undergoing insulin-shock therapy—repeatedly induced into a convulsive coma through massive injections of insulin. Fortunately, Solomon survived. But poet and novelist Sylvia Plath did not. She had undergone both insulin and electroshock therapy in her periodic stints in mental hospitals. In February of 1963, at the age of thirty, she laid her head down in her gas oven and the hissing fumes filled her lungs. And in 1966 Toole’s Uncle George had reached the point to where his own siblings made a plea to the coroner to commit him to the psychiatric ward at Charity Hospital, a place that was described in the 1950s by one doctor as “a giant cage” where “most patients were strapped to the beds, and they had to be untied in order to examine them.” Had Toole’s illness been delayed a few more years, he might have had the benefit of advances in drug therapy and humanitarian laws implemented within the field of mental health. But that was not to be the case.

  Having completed the fall semester at Dominican, the winter holidays of 1968 offered Toole a reprieve from teaching as well as several weeks at home with his parents. He weathered Christmas and New Year’s Eve. But after the holiday season, the blinking lights, pine trees propped in living rooms shedding dry needles on the floor, smiling plastic Santa Clauses on lawns, and giant wreaths on department store windows, always seem sad and surreal in the bleakness of January. From the windy snows of New York to the chilling rains in New Orleans, winter usually dampened Toole’s spirits. This melancholy season was worse than others. As the holidays concluded, and with Mardi Gras on the horizon, Toole decided he could not return to his position at Dominican. He was absent the first day of class, and he never came back. In this decision, he compromised the family’s livelihood. The illness that plagued his mind now threatened to consume the whole family.

  On January 19, the bough snapped. Toole and his mother had a disagreement that erupted into a devastating fight. Thelma never confessed to the cause of the argument. Whatever the tipping point, the dispute escalated beyond reason. Bitterness, resentment, and a mind riddled with paranoia exploded in their house on Hampson Street. Toole stormed out. The next day he returned while his mother was away. He packed some of his belongings and went to the bank to withdraw his money. He quit his job, and he quit his parents. In his blue Chevy Chevelle he left New Orleans and took to the road embarking on his final journey.

  Every spring a special generation of the Monarch butterfly travels thousands of miles north, across America to return to its ancestral home. Its route was once veiled in mystery, but eyewitnesses have seen the Monarch in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever its path, shortly after it reaches home, the delicate creature will die.

  Chapter 12

  Final Journey

  On the day Toole left New Orleans, Richard Nixon ascended to the office of president to take the helm of a country mired in the Vietnam Conflict and countless Cold War fronts. In his inaugural address, Nixon spoke of peace and love and of the world as God sees it, “Beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.” Just as the pristine blue-and-white marble spinning in space belies the heartache of its inhabitants, the silent passing of days tormented Thelma as she waited to hear from her son. He was out in the world somewhere. He could have gone in any direction.

  She suspected he would head to Lafayette to the home of the Rickelses. In his moment of crisis, it would make sense to seek refuge in the warm embrace of the family that always appeared to him stable and lovely. The next day Thelma called Patricia Rickels to make sure her son had arrived. Patricia told her that she had not seen him. Thelma did not believe her. “Please, Please!” she begged, “From one mother to another, just tell me he is there. I won’t even ask to speak with him. Just tell me he is safe.” Hearing the guilt-racked pleas, Patricia wanted to tell her that her son was okay, but she could not. “I am sorry, Mrs. Toole,” she said. “I have not seen him.” “How could you be so cruel?” Thelma turned on her. “Why would you torment me so?”

  Days turned into weeks. Thelma called anyone she could think of who might know where he was. No one in Lafayette had seen him, so they told her. She called Cary Laird, who was now living in Florida. Laird had not seen him. “How long has he been gone?” he asked. “For several weeks,” she responded. He could sense her distress, and he reassured her that Toole would never do anything to harm himself. He would certainly come back.

  By mid-February, Mardi Gras celebrations were in full swing. Streets echoed with the sounds of marching bands and laughter. The Mardi Gras Indians danced in their costumes of vibrant feathers and beads. And yet her son never broke the aching silence in their home. Her boy with those “dark, luminous eyes” who once doted on her, praised her piano playing, and requested gold-framed pictures of her, never relieved her pain.

  But this wasn’t about Thelma. Toole had unbound himself from his roles as professor, writer, and son. With money in his pocket, throwing care out the window, he roamed the country. North, south, east, or west, he was on a journey, looking for something he had not yet found, perhaps something more to life than the confinement of his dutiful expectations. He spent two months on the road. The details of his trip remain largely a mystery. But one certainty lay in the distance: every journey must come to an end. After such a long period, perhaps the challenges of home weren’t as bad as he thought. Perhaps he just needed some time away from it all, a little room to breathe. It seems he turned back toward New Orleans.

  It was nearing the end of March, when the warm sun chases away the cold rainy days of winter, when the irises bloom in the bayou. But as he headed west toward New Orleans, the road signs, the landscape, the smells must have grown familiar. And perhaps those sights, no longer recollections softened by the sepia tones of memory, cut with the sharpness of reality. He turned off the main route onto Popps Ferry, an inconspicuous road just outside Biloxi. He parked his car under the shade of pine trees, the same area he took his friend Dave Kubach years before.

  In those woods, removed from the beaches, it seems he found some peace. He placed a final letter to his parents atop the pile of papers in the passenger seat. He unwound a garden hose, inserted one end into the exhaust pipe and propped the other end in the window crevice. Returning to the driver’s side seat, he shut the door. He had followed the ritual: a final word in writing, a method of his choosing, and now to follow through with the design. He placed his fingers to the keys in the ignition. In New Orleans his mother waited for a sign, the phone to ring, a note in the mail, anything. At Dominican, whispered rumors circled among students as to what had become of Mr. Toole. In New York, Gottlieb had moved on to his new job at Knopf, never hearing again from the young, talented writer from New Orleans. Somewhere over the Gulf, a brown pelican flew low over the water, the tips of its
wings nearly grazing the dark, glassy surface. The novelist, the poet, the scholar, the professor, the man who brought so much laughter to his friends, turned his wrist. The engine roared, and the noxious fumes billowed into the cabin. John Kennedy Toole faded from this world, alone in the woods on a balmy spring day, as the Monarch butterflies fluttered across the Gulf of Mexico, dancing on air, returning home.

  His journey was over. His body lay lifeless in the car. It was March 26, 1969. He was thirty-one years old.

  Hours later, the Biloxi police department received a call about a suspicious car on the side of the road—likely a suicide. They dispatched an officer to the scene. Shortly thereafter, Thelma Toole received the sign she had awaited and most feared. Within twenty-four hours the car was towed, the papers in the passenger seat collected, and his body returned to New Orleans. At 3:30 the next day, services were held at a funeral home on Elysian Fields and a religious service at St. Peter and Paul church a few blocks away. There were only three people in attendance: his mother, his father, and Beulah Mathews, his childhood nanny. It was an unusually quiet end to a life that held such promise, a life that had been tailored for brilliance. In a city that never shied away from death, where people sing dirges to the grave and celebratory songs after burial, where they once held picnics in graveyards and whitewashed family tombs on All Saint’s Day, Toole had no litany of eulogies recalling his better days when his mind was sharp, his smile bright, and his laughter infectious—no such graces for a man who had committed the sinful act of self-destruction. In fact, he was fortunate to have a service at all, considering the stigma the church placed on suicides, even though the second Vatican council softened its stance on the issue. Fortunately, the church that the Ducoings had attended for generations agreed to hold the funeral. Born and baptized in Uptown, his final rites were performed in the church where his parents had married, in that same working-class section of the city they sought to escape, the Faubourg Marigny. And after the service, the elderly parents escorted their son’s body to the Ducoing tomb in Greenwood Cemetery.

  The next day his obituary was published in the Times Picayune. It was the shortest entry on the page. The “beloved son of Thelma Ducoing and John Toole” and a “native of New Orleans” had died. The implicit understanding of his actions needed no publication. In taking his own life, he had shamed the family and left his parents devastated.

  Thelma now had years to ponder the haunting questions that remained. She started to piece together where her son had spent the last sixty-four days of his life. She still believed he had gone to Lafayette. And perhaps she was right. But if he had gone to the Rickels house on January 20, he would have found their driveway full with cars; they were hosting a book club party. As his world came undone, he would have found his sanctuary overrun with a convivial sort, strangers talking about literature. In such a fragile state of mind, he likely continued down the road.

  From his receipts and remaining belongings, it seemed her son headed west to San Simeon, California, and visited the Hearst Castle, an icon of American excess and the inspiration for Xanadu in Citizen Kane. California was the land of stars, the land of Marilyn Monroe. And Alvin Foote, his mentor from his early college days, who had believed in Toole’s gifts as a writer, had once lived an hour away from San Simeon. But when Toole needed saving from the “bottom of Morro Bay,” as Foote had written to him in 1957, no voice from afar came to save him.

  From California it appears he headed east, driving across the country to visit Andalusia, the home of Flannery O’Connor, in Milledgeville, Georgia. In a taped interview, when Thelma was asked how she knew he visited O’Connor’s home, she emphatically responded, “He did . . . we saw the STUB . . . IN . . . HIS . . . POCKET!” It is unclear what ticket stub she references. While O’Connor died in 1964, her home was not open to the public in 1969. He could have made prior arrangements to visit the home, but there was no ticketed entry. Perhaps he just drove by to see the house where the frail Georgian Catholic once fed her brightly colored peafowls when she wasn’t writing her stories of violence and redemption.

  Between California and Georgia, he could have visited any number of places. And aside from a possible attempt to visit the Rickelses, it seems he did not attempt to reach out to friends. He knew people in Wisconsin, Chicago, New York, Colorado, and Florida, but perhaps he did not search for company or counsel. While we may never know for sure what route he took, his journey stands as a powerful metaphor for his experience. From the opulence of the west to the tempered graces of the east, he had traveled to the edges and determined he could carry on no longer.

  Of course, difficult and haunting questions come with every suicide. Why did he do it? What drove him to follow through with such a heinous act? What was the breaking point that determined his actions? Perhaps the letter he had written to his parents and placed upon the pile of papers contained some insight to his reasons. When asked about its contents, Thelma varied in her responses. Sometimes she would say it was filled with “insane ravings.” Other times she would say that he apologized for what he did and that he loved them. But we will never know for sure. Thelma destroyed the letter. And the other documents found in the car were placed in a box in the Biloxi police department. In August of 1969, five months after Toole committed suicide, Hurricane Camille slammed into the Gulf Coast, and the waters carried away those papers. The beginnings of his third novel, The Conqueror Worm, may have dissolved into the Gulf of Mexico. Much like the details of his journey, the true contents of his suicide note and his other effects with him at the time of his death will remain a mystery.

  Regardless of those documents, Thelma supplied an answer to the question of why. She unequivocally blamed Robert Gottlieb. As she saw it, the editor from Simon and Schuster had singlehandedly lifted her son’s hopes to unrivalled heights, only to dash them upon the jagged rocks of his “vitriolic attacks.” She never suggested that her son mentioned Gottlieb in his final letter. Nonetheless, she determined the New York editor had tortured her son into his psychosis. But Gottlieb proved a convenient scapegoat, especially after the publication of the novel.

  Perhaps Thelma was unaware, or chose to ignore, the degree to which her son confided in Gottlieb, confessing aspects of his life that he rarely shared with others. In fact, when George Deaux read the letters from Gottlieb to Toole, he observed that the letters “sound more like the responses of a therapist to his patient than an editor to a professional writer.” Deaux found a stark difference between his own interactions with Gottlieb and Toole’s correspondence with him. “I always found him to be kind and supportive, but I would not have expected him to be so indulgent in dealing with a writer’s personal problems and sensibilities.” While Thelma saw Gottlieb as a tyrannous tormenter, his letters demonstrated that he recognized and praised the talents of her son. Ultimately, as an editor, he had to think about the interests of the publishing house and the literary market. Initially, Toole did not weather Gottlieb’s call for revisions well. But to suggest Gottlieb singlehandedly destroyed her son’s otherwise stable mental state may have been a way for her to displace her own feelings of guilt.

  Other claims have been made as to the roots of his psychological crisis, some of the most onerous coming from the biography Ignatius Rising . Biographers René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy intended to write a book on the making of the movie A Confederacy of Dunces, but their project became a biography of Toole once the movie deal fell through. Their narrative repeatedly suggests that Toole suffered from latent homosexuality. They interviewed a man who claimed to have had a strictly sexual relationship with Toole in the late 1960s. However, as Fletcher has pointed out, the authors of Ignatius Rising offer this man’s testimony, even as he admits those years in New Orleans were a drunken blur to him.

  A tale of conflicted sexuality may have made a scintillating story for Hollywood at one time, as was evident when Fletcher was interviewed by a producer wanting to do a biopic of Toole. Determined to depict the auth
or in the dark corners of French Quarter gay bars, the producer grew frustrated when Fletcher maintained he never thought his friend gay. He always found Toole to be rather asexual. Granted, some of Toole’s friends held suspicions that he harbored unrealized homosexual inclinations. Polites sensed it, especially considering Toole’s awkward reaction at the gay party they went to together. Although, Polites admits his interpretation was not based on a confession or evidence. And Toole’s high school and college friends recall his friendship with the rather attractive and effeminate young man named Doonie Guibet. On one occasion, they went to see Mae West together, delighted by her sexual euphuisms. Cary Laird and his sister, Lynda, knew that Toole was socializing with Guibet. Lynda observes, “I always thought Ken was so interested in people that he wanted to befriend all walks of life.” To the Lairds, Guibet was another color in the spectrum of humanity that Toole sought to understand, not a reflection of an unrealized aspect of his identity. According to Thelma, when Toole paid a visit to Guibet at his New York apartment years later, he found a questionable picture hanging on the wall. He “didn’t like what Doonie was doing with his life, and eventually he broke with him.” Guibet was later accused and arrested for the murder of his roommate in the early 1980s.

  The women Toole dated may also contest to suggestions of Toole being latently homosexual as well. Most likely Ruth Lafranz would not have carried on their relationship so long had she thought him gay. The mysterious “Ellen” repeatedly declared her love for him in a letter from New York. And Patricia Rickels, while never dating him, always felt he was attracted to women, especially considering his flirtations with her in front of her husband, as well as flirting with some of the wives of other faculty members. “A lot of people say he was homosexual,” Patricia says, “but I never thought that. He liked women.... He liked me, very much. He took a fancy to me.” And one of his final confidants, Professor Ussery, who was sensitive to Toole’s mental anguish, never detected that his sexuality had any bearing on the illness that consumed him.