Butterfly in the Typewriter

Table of Contents

 

 

 

The book sold well, we understand,
Although the cover itself would command
A buyer's attention: a large, abstract bee
Crushing a butterfly with a typewriter key.

The life and death of John Kennedy Toole is one of the most compelling stories of American literary biography. After writing
A Confederacy of Dunces
, Toole corresponded with Robert Gottlieb of Simon and Schuster for two years, exchanging edits and commentary. Unable to gain Gottlieb's approval, Toole gave up on the novel, determining it a failure. Years later, he suffered a mental breakdown, took a two-month journey across the United States, and finally committed suicide on an inconspicuous road outside Biloxi, Mississippi. Years later, his mother found his manuscript in a shoebox and submitted it to various publishers. After many rejections, she cornered author Walker Percy, who found it a brilliant novel and facilitated its publication. It became an immediate sensation, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, twelve years after Toole's death.

Since then,
A Confederacy of Dunces
has been hailed as the quintessential New Orleans novel. As many New Orleanians attest, no other writer has captured the essence of the city more accurately than Toole. And to this day the city celebrates its honored author. A statue of the protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, stands outside the old D. H. Holmes Department Store. Characters from the book make Mardi Gras appearances. And any reader of the novel who visits the French Quarter will certainly smile at the ubiquitous sight of a Lucky Dog cart.

But the novel exceeds the confines of regionalism. While Toole roots the characters and the plot in New Orleans, his narrative approach reflects influences from British novelists Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, and Charles Dickens. Within American literature Toole is closer to Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman than he is to iconic Southern writers Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. In the scope of Southern literature,
Confederacy
seems an aberration. But within the scope of the modern novel, it is at home in its dark humor and acerbic wit.

Its continued success offers the most powerful testimony to its ability to reach past the bounds of that swath of land between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. To this day, it continues to garner readers. It has been translated into more than twenty-two languages and remains in print all over the world. Teachers and professors use the novel in their classes, from high school lessons on satire to graduate courses in creative writing. Plans for a film version of the book have been in development since its publication. And it recurrently appears on the “best of” lists periodically published in popular media. Notably, author Anthony Burgess places
A Confederacy of Dunces
alongside
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and
The Catcher in the Rye
in his
New York Times
article “Modern Novels; the 99 Best.” Clearly,
A Confederacy of Dunces
is more than a humorous romp through a Southern city; it is a classic of modern literature.

And its place is rightly earned. In the foreword to the novel, Walker Percy describes it as a compilation of Western thought and culture, from Thomas Aquinas to Don Quixote to Oliver Hardy. He considers the menagerie of characters a crowning achievement. And he recognizes it as a comedy that exceeds mere humor and ascends to the highest form of
commedia
. But as Percy celebrates the great accomplishments of the novel, he grapples with the detectable sadness in the book, one that is rooted in the biography of Toole. Percy writes, “The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author—his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty two.” Henceforth, readers of
Confederacy
have negotiated this intriguing paradox of the tragicomedy; the reader's laughter is never far from the tinge of sadness in remembering Toole's tragic end. More so than most novels,
A Confederacy of Dunces
prompts the reader to ponder the life and death of the author. And while his suicide is well known, his personality, his struggles, and his triumphs, in essence, his life has hitherto remained an obscure entry within the collection of biographies of twentieth-century novelists.

Some critics may defend Toole's marginal place within the canon of American literature. Having only one novel of merit, he is easily dismissible as a one hit wonder. While talented, he does not provide scholars with a breadth of novels to dissect. But such criticism has rarely quelled biographical interest in Harper Lee, Emily Brontë, or Margaret Mitchell. And if we base our measure on quality, then the prolific writer
has no more value within the literary canon than the individual who composes a single masterpiece.

In fact, interest in Toole has never waned since the publication of
Confederacy
. As early as 1981, writers and scholars recognized the remarkable story of his life and its place within literary history. Until her death in 1984, Toole's mother, Thelma Toole, received many requests of permission to write a biography of her son, and she patently declined them. But in her reply to the request of James Allsup, an acquaintance of Toole from his army days in Puerto Rico who had since become a professor of English, Thelma outlined the essential rigors required of any Toole biographer:

After listing these stipulations, she politely declined his request.

To any established professor, Thelma's hypothetical expectations would be absurd. But she accurately portrays the difficult grounds a Toole biographer must navigate. Even for his mother, who usually appeared quite omniscient in regard to her son, composing the narrative of Toole's life was a daunting task. She attempted on one occasion but got no further than a few pages.

Such challenges became painfully evident in the first biography of Toole,
Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole
, written by René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy. While Nevils and Hardy provide readers with an unprecedented resource in that they published the correspondence between Gottlieb and Toole, albeit without Gottlieb's permission, they also depict Toole as a man suffering from an Oedipal complex, suppressed homosexuality, alcoholism, madness, and an
appetite for promiscuity. Toole becomes a caricature of the fatal artist. While some reviewers forgave Nevils and Hardy for their indiscretion, many friends of Toole found the book insidious. Toole's friend Joel Fletcher angrily observed, “The authors have so carelessly written half-truths and untruths about a friend who is not here to defend himself.”

Troubled by the sensationalism in
Ignatius Rising
, Fletcher authored
Ken and Thelma
, in which he offered a balanced biographical sketch of Toole, grounded in interviews and his own memories. But as Fletcher admits, his book “is a memoir, not a biography.” In
Ken and Thelma
, Fletcher writes, “A good biography of Toole is yet to be written. I hope that a future biographer of Toole will find this account a useful and accurate document.” Indeed, he has offered the most credible work on Toole to date, and he has given me indispensible guidance for this book.

In my pursuit to understand Toole, I neither aimed to diagnose him, nor cast him in the mold of the tortured artist. In reading his letters, his unpublished poems and stories, and the same novels on his bookshelf at the time of his death, in interviewing his friends, family, and acquaintances, I have sought to understand Toole on his own terms. I have sought to compose a biographical narrative in which Toole would recognize himself if he were alive to read it.

Through this exploration, one sees Toole in his complexity. At times, the abnormal circumstances of his rearing and his social marginalization elicit sympathy. At other times, his sense of superiority and his curt comments make him deplorable. And yet, his friends, even those he offended, clearly enjoyed his stories and his wit. All the while, he struggled to define himself as either a scholar or a fiction writer, as either a son bound by filial duty or an independent man. In the end, his life exhibits a single case of a man full of humor and laughter, who strived for greatness but could not find a way to cope with his demons.

Of course, despite my best efforts, his mother, Thelma, will always be the primary hand that has shaped the way we understand his life. It was at her choosing which documents survived and which ones were discarded. While she saved miscellanea from his school days—blue books and math homework—she destroyed his suicide note. In interviews, she offered a nostalgic vision of her son, an emphatic, one-dimensional portrayal of her unrecognized genius, from birth to death. But she rarely discussed his mental illness. While she proclaims his
mind a “Mt. Parnassus,” she withholds insight into the earthquake that reduced him to rubble.

Avoiding such discomfiting moments in the life of her son, Thelma preferred to recall the moments she idealized, usually moments from his childhood. Reminiscing over the hours she spent gazing at her baby, she said, “Those eyes. Those magnificent eyes. Not only beautiful, but lu-minant. A light in them.” Of course, there was no way for his mother to foresee the tragic end thirty-one years later. There was no way for her to foresee her grown son sitting in that car on a country road outside Biloxi, a garden hose channeling exhaust fumes into the cabin, extinguishing the light from his eyes.

But what mother, holding her newborn child, could imagine such horror at a time of such bliss? No, the shadow of his suicide did not loom over him as he slept in his cradle, as he swam with friends in the pool at Audubon Park, as he ventured to New York to attend Columbia University, as he taught English to Puerto Rican recruits, or as he composed his literary masterpiece. Only in retrospect does his suicide become the dark backdrop to his brilliance. In his lifetime he touched the lives of his family, his friends, and his students with his tenderness and humor. And through his singular novel he continues to touch the lives of readers all over the world with his ability to illustrate the most ridiculous, yet oddly realistic characteristics of humanity. And so, while his demise came at his own hand, his life story deserves the understanding and the celebration that we offer any writer who has left an enduring contribution to our world.