Butterfly in the Typewriter

by Cory MacLauchlin

  Before the release of the book, Thelma arranged her finances for the change she anticipated. She removed Arthur from all of her accounts, requesting that he sign an agreement to “no longer associate . . . with Mrs. Thelma D. Toole in money matters of any kind.” It was perhaps for the best, considering the financial boon she was about to receive.

  LSU Press printed three thousand copies of the first edition. And as it circulated among reviewers, it quickly gained attention, in part because of its merits as a novel, but also because of the remarkable story of its publication. From its first moments in the public, the novel became indelibly linked to the story of Toole’s death and the resilience of his mother to ensure his dream came true. In March 1980, Kirkus Reviews, a first-stop reviewer for book critics, billed it as “a masterpiece of character comedy” with its “mix of high and low comedy,” making it “almost stroboscopic: brilliant, relentless, delicious, perhaps even classic.” But the review ended with regret that having committed suicide, Toole left “only one astounding book.” A month later Publisher’s Weekly released a glowing review, claiming of the author, “The way he crams invention and exuberance into a perversely logical plot and molds his Pandora’s box of ills into a comic novel which rings with laughter is something of a miracle.” LSU Press had added a “classic” and a “miracle” of fiction to its list. But it was quickly apparent the small academic press would never be able to meet public demand for the book. In April, Grove Press bought subsidiary rights to publish Confederacy in paperback, which would allow it to meet the market demand. It had taken fifteen years for the manuscript to find its way to publication, but the success that followed happened at breakneck speed. Editions of Confederacy flew off the shelves. And as a Cinderella story of the publishing world, large newspapers and magazines took interest in both the novel and the tale of its publication.

  In the summer and fall of 1980, reviews came in overwhelmingly positive. From small town papers to big-city book reviews, from novelists to professional critics, it seemed almost every week somewhere in the country a paper published a review of A Confederacy of Dunces. Several of these echoed Kirkus, claiming it an immediate classic, an original masterpiece, and one of the few books that made austere reviewers laugh until tears welled in their eyes and their bellies hurt. They compared the novel to the works of Dickens, Joyce, Rabelais, Waugh, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot. It seemed every reviewer strived to compare Toole’s sense of comedy, his use of plot, and his characters to one of his literary predecessors. But they still acknowledged that Toole was no mimic of other novelists. Most agreed, his work was highly original.

  As reviewers celebrated the achievement of the novel, they were bound to discuss its remarkable path to publication. Prior to the commercial success of the book, they knew far less about Toole than most readers do today. Initially limited to Percy’s foreword, the unanswered questions surrounding Toole’s tragic end haunts these reviews. Desperate to understand the author, at times reviewers had difficulty distinguishing Toole from Ignatius. In 1980 in the Bloomsbury Review, Michael O’Connel merges the author and protagonist into a single entity, claiming, “Toole-Ignatius despises living in the world, inveighs and scolds; Ignatius in his Big Chief diary and Toole in his fiction.” Even the Chicago Tribune Review of Books, after declaring the novel was not a good book, suggested that it was “an exorcism, a cry nobody heard.” Seeing his novel as a call for help offers a poignant and rich answer to the mysteries surrounding Toole. But such an interpretation served the reader’s curiosity about the author at a time when little was known, more so than offering insight into his life. From the earliest discussions of his life, there have been misgivings in approach, people looking for answers in places without considering who he was or from what circumstances he had come.

  Gradually, interviews and reporters discovered more information about Toole’s sense of dejection. Writers sympathized with his struggle with the publishing industry, expressing heartfelt indignation as they imagined Toole suffering rejection after rejection. But this sympathy seems to veil their own incredulity. David Shields barely restrained himself from a tirade against the monstrosity of New York publishing when he wrote, “One has to believe there was a deliberate effort somewhere in those ivory towers along the northeastern seaboard to keep this book from the reading public. Why? Well, the answer to that would overrun this space and wouldn’t be very pretty to boot.” His suspicions seem to stem from his own frustration with publishers.

  Jonathan Yardley, in a review reprinted in several papers across the country, proclaimed the utter fallibility of New York editors, and in doing so expressed the underlying issue that threads many of the positive reviews: the system of book publishing may serve the interests of a company more so than the interests of readers and the art of literature. The meeting point between art and business has never been easy. Writers such as Toole watched, in the late 1960s, as publishers grew into multimillion-dollar corporations and agents became facilitators between writers and editors. And while the filtering process became more rigorous, there emerged an uneasy sense that it didn’t produce higher-quality work. Writers and readers grumbled that the publishing industry, in its shift toward big business, might be rejecting works that deserved publication as a valuable, cultural product, not just a sellable item created to attract the whims of the mass market. Yes, Confederacy had its problems, reviewers admitted, but so did the last five books from Random House or Knopf or Simon and Schuster. And those books, they seemed to say, didn’t give me half the enjoyment Confederacy did.

  This silencing is part of why the story of its publication held such interest to readers. It suggests that the presumed cultural role of publishers to deliver quality literature may be compromised by motives of profit and marketability. Ironically, as this story validates a critique of the commercialism of the publishing industry, it simultaneously made the novel more marketable. Toole didn’t have this story to reference in 1963. A solitary writer complaining about publishers, convinced no one appreciates his genius, has few sympathizers. Toole’s heartbreaking life story disables dismissal of those complaints, allowing many readers and writers to feel vindicated in their frustrations and suspicions of the publishing world.

  Of course, the history of Toole that emerged in the popular media did not take into full context his circumstances. Thelma did not want to talk about her son’s death, especially the notion that he suffered from mental illness. She all but rejected that possibility by blaming Gottlieb. And Toole’s struggle and his mystery spurred reviewers to engage in mythmaking. Anthony Burgess imagined Toole “hawking [the manuscript] around the publishing houses of New York” and after receiving the final rejection from “the biggest of the publishing mavens” committed suicide. And one reviewer in the San Francisco Review of Books imagined that Toole likely killed himself directly following his completion of the final page of the novel, as if the labor pains of his glorious creation were so taxing he could live no longer. The critics were unaware that Toole sent it to only one editor, an editor that sustained a lengthy correspondence for more than two years and never closed off the possibility of publication to him. He could have sought publication through another press, perhaps a smaller one. And reviewers seem to overlook the risky territory of publishing a manuscript of a dead, unknown writer. After all, if the novel had been poorly received by readers and reviewers, the question would have gone the other way: Why would they publish a dead author’s work when there were plenty of talented writers still living?

  A few reviews maintained sympathy for the tragic end of the writer but were not ready to offer the book accolades that pervaded media discussion. Negative reviews tended to fault Toole for not following the rule of creating a dynamic main character. They argue that no one changes in the book. Such reviewers saw no hope in this world that Toole created and therefore despaired in the creation of it. And the most damning reviews cast doubt on the novel’s ability to stand had the author not committed su
icide. Such sharply critical responses mostly came from media venues with small, local readerships, not a national audience.

  By and large reviewers acknowledged some faults of the novel. Granted, had Simon and Schuster published Confederacy it would have been a very different book. Toole made changes, but Thelma destroyed the “Gottlieb revisions.” She instructed LSU Press not to edit a word, “not even a preposition.” So it appears the version of Confederacy we have today is the first version, the one that Thelma deemed pure, even though Toole may have believed that the novel was getting better with those edits. There was another version of Confederacy in the making, but Thelma determined that anything to do with Gottlieb would taint the genius of her son. And while critics identified technical flaws in the novel, most reviewers resisted literary pretentiousness. They recognized that the joy to be garnered from the reading of the book might be as valuable a literary contribution as a political or social message.

  But perhaps such issues stem from our awkward cultural relationship with comedy, especially when it strives to be high art. America has long seen comedy as a genre for the masses, unsophisticated and often adolescent. It is a sideshow to more serious endeavors, like tragedies or histories. But Toole did not see comedy as an afterthought. The humor in a story, ironies, and contradictions were emblematic of real life. David Evanier, fiction editor of the Paris Review, may have offered the most perceptive comment regarding the way to understand the humor of this novel when he wrote, “A Confederacy of Dunces transcends the suffering of life through laughter.” Evanier echoes literary critic, historicist, and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin who, in analyzing Rabelais, recognizes that in the culture of carnival, the culture from which Confederacy springs, laughter is not a veiled cry for help or a reminder of tragedy, but rather the sound of victory.

  Indeed, the triumph of Toole’s novel seemed unstoppable. It was one of five books nominated for the PEN Faulkner Award in 1981. It made best-seller lists in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Translated versions of the book were printed in nearly every European country. But the greatest recognition came when a select group of representatives from the publishing world gathered together at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Inside the same brick building that Toole had passed by every day during his first year at Columbia, the Pulitzer Board reviewed the submissions for fiction writing. After deliberations, the announcement came. In April of 1981 John Kennedy Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for A Confederacy of Dunces. It was only the second time the board had awarded a posthumous prize and the first to a writer who was previously unknown. And to date Confederacy is the only novel published at a university press to be awarded a Pulitzer.

  While reviewers despaired over some aesthetic issues, and some cynics suspected the story of Toole’s death a grand hoax to boost sales, in winning the Pulitzer Prize he gained official recognition for the literary merit of his work. Thereafter, a tide of interest in finding out more about this author and his mother swelled from the media. Newspapers and journals ran exposés on Thelma Toole. She was invited to dinners and conferences. She was interviewed on Canada A. M., a national television show broadcast from Toronto. And a few weeks after winning the Pulitzer Prize, she received a request to appear on the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder in New York. While she had spent her youth dreaming of stardom on the stage and her adulthood preparing her students for performances, claiming only the edge of the spotlight for herself, in her final years Thelma was the star. She rose to the occasion. She was the keeper of her son’s story, the hero of the tale. And as she took her place on her throne as the Queen Mother of the literati, people came to her doorstep to pay tribute, offering praise and tokens of gratitude for her accomplishment. She received them graciously.

  However, when it came to gifts of flowers, she preferred silk ones. She hated to watch the colors fade, she said. She hated to watch them die.

  Chapter 14

  Fame

  Sitting in his NBC studio in April of 1981, Tom Snyder must have thought the interview with Thelma Toole would be a soft piece compared to his other interviews. Snyder was known for bringing Americans face to face with figures such as John Lennon, Charles Manson, and Iggy Pop. Sitting across from his guests, Snyder would smoke cigarettes as he asked hard-hitting questions. But how hard hitting could he get with a seventy-nine-year-old woman who used a walker and who had relentlessly fought to have her dead son’s novel published? Joel Fletcher, who accompanied Thelma to New York, recalled that Snyder didn’t know what to make of her. Thelma commanded a surprising presence in the interview. She told the story of her son’s life, the book’s publication, and she talked about her Irish lineage. Nearing the end of the interview, she gave her signature line that she used to conclude most of her public appearances. “I walk in the world for my son,” she said. “I’m humble because I was a vessel to bring a scholarly genius—he was a scholarly genius and a literary genius.” Snyder replied, “Well, I’ll tell you something, his mom ain’t too shabby either.” She looked back at Snyder. “I ain’t something the cat dragged in, am I?” she said. “You sure ain’t,” Snyder agreed.

  In the great play of life, Thelma reached her pinnacle in her final act. She had her moment of fame in the national media. As reporters sought information on her son, they were also taken by Thelma’s unique personality, characterized at times in unflattering terms. When Dalt Wonk did a two-part series on Toole, he ended it with a rather embarrassing, although humorous, depiction of Thelma the socialite, being lifted by a crane onto a boat to meet the consul of Venezuela. And when People magazine ran an article by Mary Vespa, who quoted John Broussard calling Thelma a “megalomaniac” and suggesting that Toole “was getting back at Mrs. Toole in the book,” it created a dividing line between those who saw Thelma as more of a villain than a hero. Granted, many of Toole’s friends in Lafayette never had a rosy impression of Thelma. After all, in 1964 Broussard had listened to his friend in his cups confess his awful situation living with his parents. And four years after that confession, Toole committed suicide. But many people were quick to come to Thelma’s defense; several were her previous students. Nola Schneider wrote to People, declaring,As one of her many students I can say that she is now, and always has been, an intelligent and elegant lady. With regard to the thoughtless and unfounded megalomaniac reference by Mr. Broussard, I pray that at 79 years of age, I will have “delusions of grandeur” rather than “delusions of doom.”

  And as the public continued to see Thelma as both entertaining and overblown, her students felt compelled to show their appreciation for her instruction and guidance. Even Marion Toole Hosli, aware of the dreadful sentiments Thelma had expressed about the Toole family, wrote her a letter thanking her for the time she had spent with her as a young girl. After congratulating Thelma on her accomplishment in getting the book published, she writes,Aunt Thelma, I have something I have wanted to tell you for a long time but never did.

  As you know, I don’t have many happy memories of my younger years. The few I do have were, and still are, the hours I spent with you at the piano, the quiet thinking times, the poems and teachings of the more beautiful things in life. Most of all, I remember the love I felt knowing that someone cared enough for me to take an interest in me! I have never said “Thank you.” Please forgive me.

  Clearly Thelma touched the lives of many people. But now edging into her eighties she had a stage like she had never had before. The trumpets of her success blared, although she always gave credit to her son, the genius.

  But as if publication and the Pulitzer were not enough vindication, in her triumph, her derision of Robert Gottlieb became vicious. In a 1981 interview she claimed that she never read the Gottlieb letters until her son had passed away, because, she said, “I never pried into his life.” And yet Nick Polites specifically recalled her tirades on Gottlieb after one of his letters had arrived. When asked if those letters would be made public she explained at the ad
vice of her lawyer that she could not do anything with them without Gottlieb’s permission, which was both true and convenient. Readers had no other sources to go by other than her side of the story. She claimed that the last letter Gottlieb had sent to Toole devastated her son with the line “It could be improved upon, but it wouldn’t sell.” In fact, Gottlieb’s last letter left the door open to Toole, even inviting him to submit another manuscript if he ever decided to work on another novel. But every hero needs a foe. And in this saga she unabashedly declared of Gottlieb, “He is the villain!” Gottlieb responded to Thelma’s assertions by simply stating he was sorry for her loss, happy the book was published, but saw no connection between Toole’s suicide and their correspondence, which ended years before he took his life. Still, Thelma continued her invective against him. In September of 1980, she made her most scathing attack on him in Horizon Magazine when she exclaimed, “He’s a creature . . . a Jewish creature.... Not a man. . . . Not a human being.” Her words were reprinted in an article in the New York Times in 1981.

  Granted, there was an undercurrent of anti-Semitic discourse surrounding the novel at the time. It was suggested, although not coming from Toole directly, that Gottlieb never accepted the novel on the basis of its representation of Jews, particularly Myrna Minkoff and the Levys, characters he felt did not work in the novel. While teaching at Hunter College, Toole had witnessed the intense sensitivity toward anything that might be construed as anti-Semitic. It would not be surprising if Toole felt the Jewish characters were misinterpreted by Gottlieb. Furthermore, in the early 1960s, many of the publishing houses in New York were privately owned by Jewish families. There remained, according to Michael Korda, who served as editor and editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster, a slight sense of division between the houses founded by Jewish entrepreneurs and those without Jewish founders, although this seems to have colored competitiveness between houses more so than interactions with writers. Thelma harbored suspicions of a Jewish plot to suppress the genius gentile voice of her son. She responded with clearly anti-Semitic language. It may have been a moment of indiscretion on her part. But in a letter to the author of the article in Horizon, Thelma conveys her pleasure with the piece and requests a subscription to the magazine, thereby suggesting she was not misquoted, misrepresented, or the least bit remorseful.